St.

Thomas and Philosophy Aquinas

title:
Lecture ; 1964
author: Pegis, Anton Charles.
publisher: Marquette University Press
isbn10 | asin: 0874621291
print isbn13: 9780874621297
ebook isbn13: 9780585306445
language: English
subject Thomas,--Aquinas, Saint,--1225?-1274.
publication date: 1975
lcc: BX1749.T7P4 1964eb
ddc: 230/.2/0924
subject: Thomas,--Aquinas, Saint,--1225?-1274.
 Page i
The Aquinas Lecture, 1964

St. Thomas and Philosophy

Under the Auspices of Wisconsin-Alpha Chapter of the Phi Sigma
Tau

by Anton C. Pegis, F.R.S.C., LL.D.

MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY PRESS

MILWAUKEE
1964
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-17418
© Copyright 1964
By the Wisconsin-Alpha Chapter of the Phi Sigma Tau
Marquette University
Second Printing, 1975
ISBN 0-87462-129-1
Printed in U.S.A.
 Page iii

To Etienne Gilson
Teacher and Friend
 Page v

Prefatory
The Wisconsin-Alpha Chapter of Phi Sigma Tau, the National
Honor Society for Philosophy at Marquette University, each year
invites a scholar to deliver a lecture in honor of St. Thomas
Aquinas, whose feast day is March 7. These lectures are called the
Aquinas Lectures, and are customarily given on the second Sunday
of March.
In 1964 the Aquinas Lecture "St. Thomas and Philosophy" was
delivered on March 8 in the Peter A. Brooks Memorial Union of
Marquette University by Dr. Anton C. Pegis, Fellow of the Royal
Society of Canada, Professor of Philosophy, Pontifical Institute of
Mediaeval Studies, and the University of Toronto.
Professor Pegis was born in Milwaukee on August 24, 1905. He
earned his A.B. at Marquette University in 1928 and his M.A. in
1929. In the fall of that year he began his doctoral studies at the
Institute of Mediaeval Studies, which had begun that year under the
direction of Professor Eti-
 Page vi
enne Gilson and received its pontifical charter ten years later. Two
years later Professor Pegis earned his Ph.D. from the University of
Toronto and returned to Marquette University as an instructor and
then assistant professor. In 1937 he became a member of the
graduate faculty of Fordham University. During his last two years
at Fordham, Professor Pegis also lectured at the Pontifical Institute
of Mediaeval Studies (Toronto). In 1946 he was named President of
the Institute, and retained this position until 1954, when he became
editor of the Catholic textbook division of Doubleday Publishing
Company. He returned to the Institute and teaching in 1961.
In the domain of Christian philosophy, Professor Pegis is a leading
American scholar, whose work as editor, lecturer, and teacher has
been directed to a better appreciation of the influence of Christian
thought on philosophical understanding. In 1946 he was elected
president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. He
was chosen to give the third Aquinas Lecture (Marquette
University)
 Page vii
in 1939, the Gabriel Richard Lecture (St. Louis University) in
1955, the McAuley Lecture (St. Joseph's College, West Hartford) in
1960, and the St. Augustine Lecture (Villanova University) in
1962. His special interest has been the Christian philosophy of
man, beginning with his doctoral dissertation on the problem of the
human soul. Progressively deeper analysis of this problem has led
Dr. Pegis to a new appraisal of what Christian philosophy is or
should be, if it were true to the mind of St. Thomas.
His published works include: The Problem of the Soul in the 13th
Century (Toronto: Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1934); St.
Thomas and the Greeks (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press,
1939); Christian Philosophy and Intellectual Freedom (Milwaukee:
Bruce, 1955); At the Origins of the Thomistic Notion of Man (New
York: Macmillan, 1963); The Middle Ages and Philosophy
(Chicago: Regnery, 1963).
He translated and edited the two-volume Basic Writings of St.
Thomas Aquinas (New York: Random House, 1944) and
 Page viii
the one-volume Introduction to St. Thomas (New York: Modern
Library, 1948). In addition, he edited the English translation of the
Summa Contra Gentiles, the five-volume On the Truth of the
Catholic Faith (Garden City: Doubleday and Company, Inc. 1956).
To this list of published works, Phi Sigma Tau is pleased to add: St.
Thomas and Philosophy.
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St. Thomas and Philosophy

I
When, in the fifth volume of his monumental history of world
systems, Pierre Duhem reached St. Thomas Aquinas, what attracted
his attention was what appeared to him to be an unresolved
situation. Between the philosophy of the philosophers, as
expounded by his teacher Albert, and Albert's own Christian
philosophy there remained many points of disagreement. Were the
arguments of the philosophers conclusive? If so, why did they lead
to so many errors about God, creation, man, the soul, and the
intellect? Or did philosophy have its own set of "truths," which
were "true" because they had been demonstrated while Christianity
proposed another set of "truths'' known by revelation? In short, as
between the philosophers and his own
 Page 2
faith, did the Christian live in a sort of no man's land between two
worlds whose truths contradicted one another?1
The work of St. Thomas was for Duhem the effort of a Christian
soul to escape from this perilous situation.
Like his master, he admits that a philosophical truth exists, and that
this truth is established by way of reasoning and without borrowing
anything from the methods of theology. Like his master, he admits
that, in great part, this truth is to be found deposited in the books of
those whom Albert called the Peripatetics. He admits likewise that
another truth is to be found in the teachings of the Church, from
which the theologians take it in order to give it a fuller exposition.
Nevertheless he is convinced that these two truths cannot be mu-
1. Pierre Duhem, Le système du monde. Histoire des doctrines
cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic (Paris: Librarie scientifique A.
Hermann et Fils), V (1917), 468-570. See p. 468.For a philosophical
critique, as rare as it is dated, see Paul Gény, S.J., "La cohérence de la
synthèse thomiste," Xenia Thomistica, ed. S. Szabó, O.P. (3 vols.;
Romae: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1925). I, 102-25.
 Page 3
tually opposed and that, on the contrary, they must agree with one
another in the most harmonious way possible; and all his efforts, it
can be said, aim to silence the dissonances that would prevent us from
seeing the disagreements between Peripatetic philosophy and Catholic
dogma.2
In an early work, the little treatise On Being and Essence, St.
Thomas asked the meaning of essence and existence as
metaphysical notions, and how these notions were realized in the
different realities that made up the universe. This question brought
him face to face with an issue that had agitated all the philosophers
and had led to their metaphysical doctrines and their
disagreements. At this metaphysical crossroad among the
philosophers, St. Thomas the metaphysician was madeand unmade.
He met the ideas and principles of Plato and Aristotle, Boethius and
Avicenna, The Book of the Causes, Iben Gabirol, Averroes and
Maimonides; he met them, he did not wholly agree with
2. Duhem, op. cit., p. 469.
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them, but neither did he ''undertake to set out in an unexplored
direction starting from hitherto undiscovered principles." Instead he
limited his own initiative to harmonizing the ways followed by his
predecessors and to taking from each one of them a part of the way
that ought finally to lead to the truth.3
This syncretism proved to be the undoing of St. Thomas since,
according to Duhem, as a philosopher St. Thomas died of
confusion and contradiction; he sought to put together a
harmonious teaching drawn, piece by piece, from all his
predecessors. He was, by turns, the disciple of his great
mastersAvicenna, Augustine, Aristotleand in his career he moved
toward the philosophy of Aristotle as interpreted by Averroes as to
his culminating philosophical position. But he held to this position
only so long as it did not disagree with Catholic dogma; when
forced to do so, he retreated to the views of Avicenna which
sometimes allowed him
3. Ibid., p. 470.
 Page 5
a better rapprochement between philosophy and theology. This
"retreat from philosophy to philosophy cannot be executed without
involving many illogical steps."4 On the notions of being, matter,
individuation, St. Thomas floated back and forth, among
contradictory views, without seemingly knowing it. Desiring to
reconcile Aristotelianism and Catholicism, which are
irreconcilable, St. Thomas adopted all possible retreats from
Aristotle in order to keep the ideal of reconciliation alive. The
result was philosophical incoherence, achieved in the name of
orthodoxy.5
Philosophically speaking, then, what is Thomism? In answering
this question, Duhem excluded Thomistic theology from his
analysis and limited himself to the philosophical field, to the
domain that had been marked out by the Physics and Metaphysics
of Aristotle. Moreover, to avoid all possible misunderstanding,
Duhem made his question even more restricted
4. Ibid., p. 567.
5. Ibid., p. 568.
 Page 6
and precise: what is philosophical Thomism? And here is the
answer:
If by Thomism is meant a single and coordinated doctrine belonging
properly to St. Thomas either through the principles from which it
flows or through the order that unites and brings together its several
parts, we believe that we can boldly answer the question thus: there is
no Thomistic philosophy.6

Duhem did not find in St. Thomas a single philosophical

proposition of importance that did not belong to some other thinker.
Sometimes St. Thomas' source was St. Augustine or the Pseudo-
Dionysius; sometimes it was Aristotle or one of his commentators;
and sometimes it was Avicenna or Algazel or Moses Maimonides
or The Book of Causes. From this point of view, the philosophical
work of St. Thomas seems like a vast emporium in which we can
recognize a whole multitude of distinct pieces taken from all the
philosophies of the past. That is why Thomism is not
6. Ibid., p. 569.
 Page 7
a philosophical doctrine but an impulse and an aspiration toward
one; it is not a synthesis but the desire of one.7
In the presence of all the philosophies of the past St. Thomas was
full of respectful admiration. His great predecessors, from Plato to
Maimonides, had discovered truth in its totality, and if their
systems seemed to disagree, this was because each one of them had
only a part of the truth; but if one were to bring them together and
combine them judiciously, one would end up by collecting into a
whole all that the human reason could discover of the truth. What is
more, with the whole of philosophical truth in his hands, one would
also not fail to recognize the full accord of this truth with that other
part of truth that God has revealed and teaches us through His
Church. And so, like a child putting a puzzle together, St. Thomas
fitted together the fragments that he had detached from
Peripateticism and the various branches of Neoplatonism,
convinced
7. Ibid., p. 569.
 Page 8
that these pieces, so different in their shapes and colors, would end
up as a harmonious picture, the philosophical image of Catholic
dogma.
So great was St. Thomas' desire for a synthesis that, according to
Duhem, he even blinded his own judgment and critical sense. It
never occurred to him that, however one might separate or even
dissociate them from their source, the doctrines of Aristotle, The
Book of Causes, and Avicenna would never end up by harmonizing
with one another; they would remain radically incompatible among
themselves, and they would be irreconcilable with the Catholic
faith. When, confronted by his juxtaposed fragments of the
philosophers, St. Thomas noticed an all too glaring discord, he did
not despair of succeeding. He made repeated efforts at a synthesis
in order to remove the discord. Sometimes his conviction that the
philosophers could be harmonized drove him to force their discord
into a synthesis, as a child might force the pieces of a puzzle to fit
together. If this result deformed the
 Page 9
texts of the philosophers, it was a witness to his unwillingness to
believe that a synthesis was impossible or that the philosophers
were irreconcilable with one another or with his own Christian
faith.8

II
The fact that in our day Duhem's case against St. Thomas as a
philosopher is some fifty years old does not make it automatically
untrue or irrelevant. The further fact that, once formulated, the case
may seem to some to be an extraordinary caricature of the attitude
and spirit of St. Thomas does not prove that it is groundless.
Admittedly, to think that as a philosopher St. Thomas was an
incoherent jigsaw puzzle of other people's opinions is a strange
idea; to think, moreover, that in the presence of the philosophers
and the diversity of their views he died of metaphysical indigestion,
is an equally strange notion. The only question is whether, strange
or not, Duhem's case against St.
8. Ibid., p. 570.
 Page 10
Thomas does not contain a fruitful point for our examination.
To think of St. Thomas as Duhem had done is to attribute to him
two failures. He failed to understand each of the great philosophers
before him in any adequate way and therefore, in an effort at a
synthesis among them, he produced an incoherent patchwork quilt
of discordant philosophical doctrines and opinions. This failure was
part and parcel of another one. St. Thomas also failed to formulate
a metaphysical doctrine of his own, original and coherent, and one
that would have embodied the synthesis that he dreamed of
making. But he could not reconcile the philosophers with one
another, and he could not achieve the ideal of a harmony between
the world of philosophical truth and that of revelation. For, having
failed as a philosopher, St. Thomas was also bound to fail as a
theologian. How could he defend the unity of truth, however much
he proclaimed it, if the philosophers had confused him to the point
of incoherence?
 Page 11
Many things have happened in the last fifty years that enable us to
set aside part of Duhem's difficulty as historically untenable. A
patient reading of St. Thomas makes it quite clear that one of his
earliest and most persistent efforts was to establish a fundamental
philosophical tradition that he attributed to Aristotle and that he
used as a yardstick in interpreting the philosophers. He criticized
the various Platonisms that he knew by means of this
Aristotelianism, just as he dealt in the same way with such
followers of Aristotle as Alexander of Aphrodisias, Avicenna, and
especially Averroes. If he could bend his predecessors for the
better, he did so and very often he did so silently. He did so
especially in the case of Aristotle whom he made into a sort of
spokesman for philosophical truth. This was not particularly
original or surprising in St. Thomas since some of his
contemporaries had gone much farther than he in this regard. In an
Aristotelian age, intensely occupied with the writings, the technical
language, and the ideas of Aristotle and his followers, the
 Page 12
question was not whether to be occupied by the intellectual world
created by the Aristotelians, but how best to do it. St. Thomas'
personal originality lay in making possible a Christian
Aristotelianism by focusing attention on specific Aristotelian
principles and truths, and by using these truths both to disarm his
opponents and to open the way for his own reading and use of
Aristotle. He could prove, for example, that Averroes was a forced
and unfaithful interpreter of Aristotle's psychology and ethics, just
as he could prove that the doctrine of the eternity of the world did
not mean in Aristotle, as it meant in Averroes, that the world was
uncreated. Of course, such specific exegetical victories did not
prove that St. Thomas' Aristotelianism was itself the right one; it
did show, however, that his interpretation was an open possibility
to be explored on its merits.
It is not necessary to argue that St. Thomas was in full possession
of his Aristotelianism, or that he had mastered the history of
philosophy, from the beginning of
 Page 13
his career. But if we allow him a scant half dozen years for this
purpose, we can say that he was master of his own intellectual
household by 1260 at the latest, when, in his middle thirties, he was
writing the Summa Contra Gentiles. There is nothing incoherent or
youthfully immature about this Thomas Aquinas. His philosophical
attitude was settled, his interpretation of Aristotle was established,
and the lines of his own defense of Aristotelianism were clearly set
forth. His metaphysical position and its vocabulary were fixed, his
use of philosophy in the service of the human communication of
sacred doctrine was openly proclaimed, and his individual
personality as a theologian was already a classic Christian
monument. Here was a manan extraordinary and single-minded
friar, the humble servant of God and of the revealed truth with
whose fire the earth had been touchedhere was a man, I say, who as
a theologian was passionately dedicated to one overall mission in
his world: he wanted to show, in relation to the intellectual
challenge posed by Aris-
 Page 14
totelianism, that, though Christianity was a religion and not a
philosophy, a divine truth on earth and not a human discovery, yet
it had a place within itself for the whole world of philosophical
truths. Christianity could contain every vestige of truth that the
philosophers had ever discovered; and it could contain all these
truths in a synthesis in which whatever truth man could find in
creation was both divine in its origin and a preamble to the still
higher truth that the same creating God had chosen to reveal to
men.
This description of the work of St. Thomis in the thirteenth century
is almost a total denial of the views expressed by Duhem. Of
course, description is not proof, and the question is to know how a
disagreement of such magnitude is possible. Assuming, indeed, that
my description is a reasonably faithful picture of what modern
historians are saying about St. Thomas Aquinas, we are left to
wonder about a rather curious phenomenon. How could Duhem
have been so wrong? How is it that such an accomplished historian
 Page 15
did not see the synthesis created by St. Thomas? And how is it that
he saw so much incoherence and so much philosophical failure?
Why did he not find the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, and
why did he not see the metaphysical foundation that he had built
for it? In part, these questions must remain without an answer; but
only in part. Why a historian does not see what others see, or why
he sees what they do not, is an unanswerable human problem. In
this sense, Duhem's personal vision of St. Thomas must remain
unexplained. And yet we can recognize something in that vision
that was pointing to a genuine problem, and that, in its very
insistence on the philosophical incoherence of St. Thomas, was
emphasizing a fact which today we are beginning to appreciate and
evaluate in a way that was unknown to Duhem and to Duhem's
time.
Duhem had set aside St. Thomas's theology in order to discover St.
Thomas' philosophy. In this effort he failed, and he concluded from
his failure both that St. Thomas had no personal philosophy
 Page 16
and that he was totally unsuccessful in reconciling the
philosophers. Now if our present-day ideas are correct, there is
something true in Duhem's position. St. Thomas did not have an
explicit and articulated personal philosophy, but, contrary to
Duhem, we think today that St. Thomas did not have one for a
much better reason than the one advanced by Duhem. He had no
philosophy, not because he failed in the effort to establish one, but
because he never meant to create a philosophical synthesis for
whatever purpose. Hence, if it is true that he never meant to be a
philosopher, he could not have died of philosophical incoherence in
the presence of the philosophers of the past from Plato to
Maimonides. And if it be asked: what, then, did St. Thomas aim to
be? the answer is: he aimed to be a theologian and, in the presence
of the philosophers, he aimed to create a theological synthesis; he
therefore set out to formulate philosophical principles in order to
use them to the extent that this was necessary for his theology. In
such circumstances, if we are
 Page 17
to understand and judge the success or failure of St. Thomas in
relation to philosophy and in the face of the philosophers, we must
evidently first discover what his professional attitude toward
philosophy was and how and to what purpose he engaged in it.
Clearly, that Duhem did not find a philosophy in St. Thomas is not
at all surprising if it should turn out to be true that there is no
autonomously developed philosophy in his personal teaching.
Moreover, if St. Thomas Aquinas did not set out to be a
philosopher, then it would not be surprising that he did not create a
philosophical reconciliation of his predecessors or bring about a
synthesis in which they could be seen in a state of philosophical
peace with one another. Perhaps Duhem should not have been as
surprised as he was at the failure of St. Thomas to reconcile his
predecessors since he knew the very reason why they were, in
metaphysical terms, irreconcilable. Indeed, does anyone really
reconcile his predecessors? If he is fortunate, as well as docile to
 Page 18
their very diversities, he may be able to climb through their
intuitions to a higher ground and in this way to transcend them;
and, having transcended them, he may look back with loyalty and
point out how much the road that he has followed is their road and
how much they aimed at that common meeting ground where he
himself had the good fortune to arrive. But this is not exactly a
synthesis, effected by some miraculous fitting together of
philosophical pieces that do not belong together; this is a new
vision, created by one man, owing to the past everything except its
own existence. As concerns St. Thomas himself, the only question
is to know what name to give to this new vision. It was not
philosophy, and to the extent that it was a vision, new and personal
and unique to St. Thomas, it was not a synthesis. What was it? It
was a theology, deliberately speaking to the intelligence of man as
a theology and using the resources of philosophy in order to
communicate to men the teaching and message of revelation.
 Page 19

III
This conclusion is as difficult to accept as it is to understand. The
conclusion says that, taking ''philosophy'' in the sense in which the
term has been used since the seventeenth century, there is no
"Thomistic philosophy"; in other words, in the sense in which
Descartes, Kant, and Hegel can be said to have had their
philosophies St. Thomas did not have one because he did not create
one. If it is appropriate to suppose that the fundamental and
personal teaching of St. Thomas is to be found in his Commentary
on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, in his two summae, and in the
great Disputed Questions (On the Power of God, On Truth, and On
Evil), then we must characterize the Thomistic teaching as theology
in its overall perspective, movement, and purpose. There is no
doubt that St. Thomas used a great deal of philosophical matter in
these works. There is also no doubt that he knew the distinction
between philosophy and theology. The question before us is in
what sense, if at
 Page 20
all, given that St. Thomas was a theologian, we can attribute a
philosophy to him.
Evidently, we ordinarily think that a "Thomistic philosophy" exists.
We write books and articles about it, and we give courses on it; it is
even a little difficult to know what the philosophy programs of
Catholic colleges around the world would be if they did not include
titles on various aspects of "the philosophy of St. Thomas." But our
question remains. If, in the modern sense of the term, St. Thomas
was not a philosopher and did not construct a philosophy, what is it
that we are teaching as his philosophy? To apply his own
distinction between philosophy and theology to St. Thomas himself
would tell us either that he knew the distinction, just as he knew
from the philosophers what it meant to be a philosopher, or that, in
the name of the distinction itself, he intended to be a theologian and
knew what he was doing. The distinction could not invent a
Thomistic philosophy if St. Thomas Aquinas did not create one.
Moreover, the fundamental reason why Duhem did not find St.
Thomas
 Page 21
the philosopher visible in the Thomistic writings was because he
was not there. We know today that a theologian was there, using
and following philosophical principles within the world of
theology, but present within philosophy for the transcendent
reasons of Christian doctrine. Is it possible that, in discovering and
teaching what we call the philosophy of St. Thomas, we have
erected into a philosophy only such philosophical principles and
notions that St. Thomas used in and for his theology? Is it possible
that we are attributing a philosophy to St. Thomas by identifying it
with what was in him a theologically managed and developed
reality?
I have asked these questions as part of an effort to understand what
the "philosophy" of St. Thomas was. In the last fifty years we have
discovered medieval philosophy in general, and the philosophy of
St. Thomas in particular, gradually and by stages. In part, this
process has meant unlearning some of the prejudices that we have
inherited from the nineteenth cen-
 Page 22
tury. But this is a separate story.9 In part, too, this same process has
meant coming to terms with a notorious historical problem, namely,
the relations between ancient philosophy and Christianity and,
more specifically, their influence on one another when the ideas of
Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus lived again in a Christian world
within the minds of St. Augustine and St. Anselm, St. Albert and St.
Thomas, St. Bonaventure and John Duns Scotus. What happened to
Greek philosophy when it became Christianized or, at least, came
to live in a Christian climate? And what happened to Christianity
itself during that same process? To limit ourselves to St. Thomas,
how are we to understand the relations between Christianity and
Aristotelianism in his case? Even if we acknowledge that he
Christianized Aristotle and, in turn, Aristotelianized Christianity, to
some extent at least, the question is to know what kind of synthesis
was produced
9. See A. C. Pegis, The Middle Ages and Philosophy (Chicago: Henry
Regnery Company, 1963), pp. 19-65.
 Page 23
in this interchange of influences between Christianity and
Aristotelianism. When we speak of St. Thomas' Christian
Aristotelianism, what exactly do we mean?
Seen in the perspective of history, the question is far from being
unimportant. How did St. Thomas relate Christianity, philosophy,
and Aristotelianism to one another in that baffling synthesis that we
find in his writings? Early in the sixteenth century there was a
controversy on the immortality of the soul, recently called the
Pomponazzi affair,10 whose main burden was to answer this
question. If the histori-
10. See E. Gilson, "Autour de Pomponazzi. Problematique de
l'immortalité de l'âme en Italie au début du XVIe siècle," Archives
d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge, XXVIII (1961), 163-
279; "L'affaire de l'immortalité de l'âme à Venise au debut du XVIe
siècle," in Umanesimo Europeo e Umanesimo Veneziano (Firenze:
Sansoni Editore, 1963), pp. 31-61. With particular reference to
Cajetan see the substantial introduction of M. H. Laurent, O.P., to P. I.
Coquelle's edition of the Commentary on the De Anima: Thomas De
Vio Cardinalis Caietanus: Commentaria in De Anima Aristotelis,
(Romae: Apud Institutum ''Angelicum," 1938), I, vii-lii.
 Page 24
cal Aristotle had not proved the immortality of the individual
human soul, and did not really believe in that soul as an intellectual
substance, how was it that St. Thomas proved out of Aristotle that
the human soul was both an intellectual substance in its own right
and the form of matter at the same time? If such a doctrine was not
Aristotelian, on what ground did St. Thomas call it Aristotelian
and, what is more critical, how did he derive from Aristotle a
conclusion that the philosophy of Aristotle could not support?
The sixteenth-century controversy does not directly concern us
here, except for one point. What were the relations between
philosophy and Aristotle in St. Thomas' mind? Did he identify
philosophy with Aristotle or, what is entirely different, Aristotle
with philosophy? The difficulties of both Cajetan and Pomponazzi
on the immortality of the soul presuppose that St. Thomas
identified philosophy with Aristotle and therefore that his own
philosophy was an Aristotelianism that could literally be
discovered and verified in the
 Page 25
text of Aristotle himself. This would mean that St. Thomas was an
Aristotelian on fundamentally Aristotle's ground, not on his own,
so that whatever philosophy St. Thomas had was in principle
identifiable with the philosophy of the Philosopher. Is this what St.
Thomas did? If so, the intellectual misfortunes of Cajetan are there
to prove that the Thomistic synthesis was a failure; it was a failure
because, in the end, the historical Aristotle could not speak any
greater or better truths than his own foundations would permit, and
to make him a spokesman of such Christian truths as the
immortality of the soul was to expose these same truths to the fate
that overtook them in Cajetan and Pomponazzi. Let us agree that if
Thomistic philosophy is Aristotelianism, such a fate is inevitable,
but let us also recognize that the result is as necessary as its
premises. We must therefore repeat our question. Did St. Thomas
identify philosophy with Aristotle or Aristotle with philosophy?
What are we to understand by his Christian Aristotelian-
 Page 26
ism both as "Christian" and as "Aristotelianism"?
During the period between the two world wars, or, roughly, from
1920 to 1940, the historians of St. Thomas Aquinas discovered his
philosophy in a most decisive way. From Del Prado to Gilson, not
to exclude such eminent names as Rousselot, Roland-Gosselin,
Sertillanges, and Forest, the students of St. Thomas Aquinas
discovered his intellectual perspective as a thinker, his basic
metaphysical intuitions, his creation of new philosophical ideas,
and his transformation of old ideas, whether Greek, Jewish, or
Arabian, as part of the effort to express new philosophical realities
in the Christian world.11 Naturally, what St. Thomas did to, and
with, the
11. This point is such a massive reality that it scarcely needs
documenting. But it may be useful to re-examine the state of the
discussion on the originality of medieval thinkers (including
especially St. Thomas Aquinas) in relation to Aristotelian philosophy
as presented by Gilson in 1932: see L'ésprit de la philosophie
médiévale (2 vols.; Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1932), I,
297-324; II, 279-90.
 Page 27
philosophy of Aristotle occupied the historians in a particular way,
but the distinctiveness and the originality of the Thomistic
synthesis, including especially its own metaphysical foundations,
were the central object of their investigation. As a result of their
work, and particularly the work of Gilson, we have come to
discover (some would say, to rediscover) what has in recent
decades been best known as the Christian philosophy of St.
Thomas Aquinas. This name is, in reality, both a historical conquest
and a battle cry, or, at least, an embattled standard requiring those
who uphold it to explain its authenticity and its legitimacy.
As we look back to some thirty years ago when St. Thomas
achieved the popularity that he has not since equalled, two ideas in
particular stand out as somehow representing his individual
signature as a medieval Christian thinker. One of these ideas was
common to his world and is embodied in a classic work of
interpretation and synthesis published by Gilson in 1932,
 Page 28
The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy.12 The purpose of this work
was to show the creative role of Christian theology in the reception
and the transformation of Greek philosophical ideas in the Middle
Ages and especially in the thirteenth century. The notion of God as
a perfect being, a free and generous creator, a loving providence
engaged intimately in His creation; the notion of creation as being a
radical beginning in existence, suspended within the world of the
divine goodness; the further notion of man himself as a free person,
whole and autonomous in his very being and experiencing within
his liberty the mystery of his return to Godhere are notions that
medieval theology was provoked into creating at the moment of
meeting Greek philosophy and especially Aristotelianism. None of
these notions was Greek in origin, though they contained Greek
elements and theologians did ex-
12. See note 11. The English translation of this work was prepared by
A. H. C. Downes (London: Sheed and Ward, 1934; New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934).
 Page 29
press them in the language of Aristotle. Moreover, while native to
Christian theology, they were philosophical in their nature as ideas
and capable of leading their own existence once they had been
created. They formed part of what may properly be designated by
the historians as a ''Christian philosophy": they were philosophical
ideas whose historical origin was religious.
St. Thomas Aquinas shared such a Christian philosophy and he
gave it a distinctive form by the character of his own metaphysical
ideas and principles. Three interrelated ideas especially marked his
attitude as a Christian thinker. The idea that God is the pure act of
being, that creation is an absolute origin and dependence in
existence and not simply a beginning in time, and that metaphysics
has to do with being seen uniquely and exclusively in the light of
its existencethese ideas constitute in their togetherness the
distinctive trademark of St. Thomas in philosophy. What has been
called his existentialism is rooted in these ideas and in
 Page 30
his employment of them both to bring Christian thought to a new
consciousness of its teaching and to give to Aristotelianism a new
foundation and a new life within the world of that teaching. It is
this latter point that concerns us in the present discussion.

IV
Between Christian theology and the philosophy of Aristotle St.
Thomas interposed a metaphysics of being that was his own
creation and that revolutionized the meaning of whatever notions
he took from Aristotle. This metaphysics was not developed by St.
Thomas in its own right or for its own sake but rather as an
intellectual tool enabling him to see and to use ancient philosophy
within a perspective that had never been its own. It was St. Thomas
who said that the ancients were on the way to the idea of creation
but did not quite reach it, though they had the principles by which
to do it; it was St. Thomas who more than once saw the principles
of Plato and Aristotle as capable of serving conclusions that these
philoso-
 Page 31
phers had never held; and it was St. Thomas who, in the name of
truths that he held in his own right, judged the distance of others
from these truths and located them accordingly. Plato and Aristotle
became St. Thomas' predecessors only after he saw and said that
they were. Plato's philosophy of essence and Aristotle's philosophy
of substance became the predecessors of St. Thomas' philosophy of
existence when he himself, having seen being from the standpoint
of existence, likewise located essence and substance as partial
aspects of being. The metaphysical world within which St. Thomas
gave such an honored place to Plato and Aristotle was his own, and
if he made Aristotle the technical spokesman of philosophy it was
in the name of the metaphysics of such a world and not in the name
of the historical metaphysics of Aristotle himself.
Two difficulties, not to say obstacles, have prevented students of
St. Thomas from appreciating his originality in the presence of
Aristotle. One is the fact that St. Thomas seems to have created his
own
 Page 32
philosophy, not for its own sake or with any view to building a
philosophy, but as a link between Christian theology and
Aristotelianism. If we do not always see the philosophical ideas of
St. Thomas in their own right, this is because they are usually
embedded in their service as an intellectual bridge opening
Christianity to philosophy and giving to Aristotelianism an
adequate metaphysical foundation within Christian thought. The
intellectualism that joins Aristotle to Christianity is St. Thomas'
own creation. It is such an effective creation that, most of the time,
we tend to see only the result that it has made possible, namely, the
Christian Aristotelianism that speaks for philosophy and for
philosophical truth in the main areas of human knowledge in which
the theologian is particularly interested. Yet this Aristotelian edifice
lives as a Thomistic creation, and so long as we recognize it as such
there is no particular harm in thinking of it as an "Aristotelianism."
The only trouble is that when we think of it as a kind of
Aristotelianism, forgetting the con-
 Page 33
tribution of the mind that created it, we are regularly puzzled by it.
We are particularly puzzled when we try to duplicate it by adding
Christianity and historical Aristotelianism to one another. We then
discover, as Cajetan and Pomponazzi discovered, that the result
does not add up to the Christian Aristotelianism of St. Thomas
himself. And assuredly it does not, since St. Thomas proceeded, not
by adding, but by creating. He created a metaphysical doctrine, he
installed it within his theology as its instrument, and he then
created his own Aristotelianism on the foundation of that doctrine.
There is a second difficulty that has served to obscure the personal
contribution of St. Thomas to his own Aristotelianism. Here we are
in the presence of a far-reaching and even embarrassing issue. It is
embarrassing, is it not, to say to those who are teaching Thomistic
philosophy that St. Thomas Aquinas was not a philosopher but a
theologian? There are recognizable Thomistic principles and there
is a recognizable Thomistic outlook, but
 Page 34
there is no autonomous Thomistic philosophy created by St.
Thomas himself. Now if St. Thomas was a theologian, how can we
learn philosophy from him? Indeed, can we do so? Can we learn
philosophy from the Summa Theologiae and from the Summa
Contra Gentiles? Here we are in the presence of that baffling
Thomistic synthesis and our problem is to know how to read it in
order not to misread it. If St. Thomas incorporated his philosophy
within his theology and intended it to be a part of that theology,
how do we read it as he meant it unless we read it as theology? And
if we read it as theology, what are the conditions under which we
can then venture to think of it as philosophy?
Since such questions affect the very nature of the Thomism that we
are teaching as philosophy, we must evidently find satisfactory
answers to them. How do we know that we can teach philosophy
from theological works, that is to say, from writings that have a
theological perspective, synthesis, and purpose? How do we know
that by this procedure we are not
 Page 35
teaching theology, as our critics often enough accuse us of doing?
If we stick to those texts in the Summa Theologiae that are
philosophical in their matter (for example, texts that have to do
with natural theology, psychology, and ethics), by what right do we
assume that parts or fragments of a theological whole somehow
become philosophy by being separated from that whole? Let us
assume that there are philosophical parts in the two summae, by
which I mean discussions about God, man, and human conduct that
are fully investigable by the human reason; but let us also suppose
that these discussions are parts of a theology, so that they are at one
and the same time philosophical in their matter and theological in
their location and presentation: what then? Are they philosophy, on
the ground of their matter, or theology, on the ground of their
treatment? Is a detached piece of theologysay, the so-called treatise
on man in the first part of the Summaphilosophy or theology?
 Page 36
And yet, in spite of its matter, what is a detached piece of
theology? Is it not a lifeless part of a once living whole, lifeless
because torn from the intellectual life and vision that sustained it in
the mind of the theologian? Ideas, after all, are not mental
furniture, not even ideas on paper; they cannot be shifted around
from room to room. Ideas are the life of the mind itself, and they
are shaped by the purposes of that mind: ideas, let us repeat, are not
mental counters for the mind to play with. Even their meaning as
an intellectual discourse depends on the mind that thinks them
rather than on their matter. The so-called treatise on man is a
theologian's vision of man, created by him at a certain moment in
history and answering to the problems of his age as he saw them.13
Its
13. The treatise on man (Summa Theologiae I, qq. 75-89) is
dominated by what St. Thomas has called the consideratio theologi,
whose effect he has pointed out no less than three times (Sum. Theol.
I, q. 75, Prol.; q. 78, Prol.; q. 84, Prol.). The effect is noticeable in two
ways: (1) the study of man is centered in the soul, not directly in the
composite as the doctrine itself requires; (2) the study is primarily
(footnote continued on next page)
 Page 37
point of focus is strictly theological (the consideratio theologi), the
point of emphasis is on the soul and not on the composite, and its
entire organization reflects throughout the perspective of this
religious vision.
(footnote continued from previous page)
interested in the intellect and its main concern is historical, exegetical
and prudential rather than doctrinal. In the presence of various
Aristotelianisms and Platonisms, St. Thomas wishes, not to expound a
theory of the human intellect, but, in the midst of conflicting opinions
and controversial issues, to enforce the notion of the intellect as
something whole, with a specificity of being and operation that
belongs to it according to its place in creation. The first two questions
of the treatise deal with what may be called the twin foundation
stones of any Christian doctrine of man: the human soul is an
incorruptible and immortal substance (q. 75); the human person is, as
a composite, a true unitary substance (q. 76). But St. Thomas nowhere
explains, except indirectly, the third pillar of his doctrine, namely, the
proportion between an intellectual soul and an organic body. A
philosophy of man, based on the doctrine of St. Thomas as
distinguished from his theological perspective, would rest on the
immortality of the soul and the unity of the human person as on its
metaphysical presuppositions; but it would derive its immediate
structure and organization as a doctrine from the principle of the
proportion between soul and body.
 Page 38
Detached from the Summa and its specific purpose, the treatise on
man is neither philosophy nor theology. It is, to apply to it the
severe but appropriate expression that Maritain has used in another
context, a piece of lifeless and sterile theology: une théologie
dégermée.14 For if the informing vision of St. Thomas himself
makes the treatise on man a theologyI mean, a theologically
centered and motivated presentation of philosophical materialswhy
is not that treatise, when bereft of its guiding vision, no more than a
lifeless corpse?
I know the standing answer to this question. Why cannot these
same materials, being in themselves philosophical, become
informed by a philosophical life in the mind of a living Thomist?
Thus informed, why is not the treatise on man a living philosophy?
Or am I arguing that Thomism can be only a theology because in
St. Thomas himself, its unique creator,
14. J. Maritain, La philosophie morale. Examin historique et critique
des grands systèmes (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1960), p. 8.
 Page 39
it was a theology? If this is my position, then, admittedly, it is a
vulnerable one. For I seem to be saying, at one and the same time,
that there is a visible philosophy at work in the two summae of St.
Thomas but that, though we see it there, we cannot study it or
consider it as philosophy because in the summae it is theology. I
thus seem to be offering the present-day philosophical student of
St. Thomas two choices: learn theology because St. Thomas'
philosophy lives with a theological light, or content yourself with
philosophical ideas that are no more than dead fragments of a
theology.
I hope and think that these are not inevitable choices, and I
certainly have no wish to make them mine. But we are in the
presence of a strange phenomenon and a strange experience when
we undertake to learn philosophy from a theologian with a view to
becoming philosophers and not theologians. Let us admit that a
theologically managed philosophyphilosophy used and shaped by
the theologian in his world and for his purposesis not philoso-
 Page 40
phy. In the theologian's perspective philosophy is experiencing a
guidance and is subject to an economy that both lie beyond its own
power to manage. If we wish to learn philosophy, and even to try to
be philosophers, we do not wish to accept a theologically managed
philosophy as a substitute since it is theology and not philosophy.
On the other hand, a theologically managed philosophy that poses
as a philosophy by detaching itself from its theological
management is still a theology, but a theology in ruins, much like a
palace in which there used to live a king but in which now no one
is living. A theology without the presence of its manager is a
helpless reality. It cannot explain its organization or its order, its
perspective or its direction. Let us recognize a crucial fact, which
for some of us may also be a cruel one. A living philosophy cannot
be derived by detaching a part of theology from the whole in which
it once lived. We cannot derive ''Thomistic philosophy'' by
removing it, part by part, from the living edifice that was St.
Thomas' theology. A
 Page 41
Thomistic philosophy constructed in this way is not a philosophy
but a dead piece of theology.
The point of this conclusion does not have to do with whether or
not St. Thomas had a philosophy; it has rather to do with whether
we ourselves can reach that philosophy, given that it was a part of
his theology. As a theologian, St. Thomas used philosophy, even his
own philosophy; he therefore formulated philosophy in a state of
service within theology and its economy. The philosophy that we
see in the summae is a Christian philosophy in a state of being used
by theology. Moreover, it is a philosophy whose specific historical
function seems to have been to assimilate the world of Aristotelian
philosophy and to do so within the religious world of Christianity.
However visible Thomistic "philosophy" may be to the modern
historian, therefore, there are at least two senses in which it is not
visible because it is enclosed within its service. It is a philosophy
living within the mind and purpose of a theologian, serving his
theological ministry; it is a
 Page 42
philosophy which, on its own ground, is serving the assimilation of
Aristotelianism. If we do not identify the philosophy of St. Thomas
either with its religious service, which would be to think of it as the
theology that in fact it was, or with the Aristotelianism for whose
technical world it served as the foundation; and if, having made
these refusals, we further refuse to identify the philosophy of St.
Thomas the theologian with a detached and therefore fragmented
piece of his theology, can we still find his philosophy? Having
recognized that philosophy to be invisible by reason of its religious
mission as a theological instrument serving the further and
historical mission of assimilating the philosophy of Aristotle, can
we still see it visibly present in St. Thomas?
The answer to this question must be that we can, but that we must
look for it in the form in which it is present in St. Thomas. In other
words, we must look for it in a man who was a professional
theologian and who spent a great deal of time shaping the ideas of
others, and chiefly
 Page 43
those of Aristotle, for use in his vision of the whole universe from
the point of view of the divine mind.15 In the presense of the
philosophers, St. Thomas was anxious to take every bit of truth that
they had, however imperfect or embedded in error, and however
much they disagreed with one another in the way in which they
reached the same conclusionfor example, the conclusion that the
universe had a first principle or cause whom Christian theology
knew as God. St. Thomas was aware that the philosophers
disagreed with one another, but he could often see a common truth
at work in their very disagreements. When the problem before him,
as he saw it, demanded that he engage in the disagreement, he did
so, and he then corrected some philosophers in the name of the
principles of others; sometimes he corrected all of them in the
name of the principles of Aristotle; or sometimes,
15. See the admirable text of the Expositio super Librum Boethii De
Trinitate q. II, a. 2, ed. Bruno Decker (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1955), pp.
86-87.
 Page 44
though much more rarely, he corrected even Aristotle himself in the
name of principles that we can only call Thomistic. But often the
Angelic Doctor stood among the philosophers as a theologian who
listened to their truths and was more anxious to gather these truths,
and the philosophers themselves, within the light of his theology
than to detail their disagreements or their errors. Why should not a
theologian, speaking for divine truth among men, open as many
doors as possible to the presence of that truth on earth?
St. Thomas was such a theologian. He had a tactical attitude toward
the philosophers that can easily be misunderstood as a willingness
to conciliate them. He was concerned, above all, to lead the
philosophers to the truth and to show them by their own steps, as
long as these were available, that the truth they were seeking lay in
Christian theology. After reading him for a number of years, we
become aware of what may be called his management of his own
discussion, and by a kind of instinct we look beneath the surface of
 Page 45
his exposition in order to find the point at issue in his mind. That
point belongs to his world, and not necessarily to ours;
consequently, unless we are willing to follow him in his purposes
and in the context of the discussion he had with his own age, he
will escape us in our very reading of him. It is too late for us to
disagree with St. Thomas in the purposes that he set himself within
the thirteenth century. But, since those purposes are embodied in
his writing, it is also too late for us to find therein anything but
what is contained in the historical letter of what St. Thomas wrote.
To rediscover St. Thomas' purposes in the concrete, to see him at
work in his own world and under his own judgment of how to react
to that world, this is our only chance of catching a glimpse of that
most elusive of realities, his philosophy. It is easy to invent what
that philosophy might have been had he not been a theologian, and
some have invented it. It is easy to identify it with the Philosopher
he created out of the historical Aristotle, and
 Page 46
many have done this too. What is not easy, and in the end the only
thing worth trying to do, is, beyond such inventions, to see the
shape and spirit of the philosophy that St. Thomas the theologian
did create. And once we begin to stand with docility in the presence
of this reality, seeking simply to see it and to understand it, we
realize that we are confronted by something that is neither the
theology that it served (including the form of that service) nor the
Aristotelian materials that it used to expound the word of God to
men. At this precise moment we are face to face with the spirit of
the personal philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas reflected in the
mirror of the theology that both created and nourished it. It is that
spirit, seen in the theologian's vision of it, that we must try to
recapture as the distinctive signature of the philosophy that St.
Thomas never spoke as a philosopher because he chose to use it in
speaking as a theologian.

V
Perhaps the most personal work that St. Thomas Aquinas wrote as
a theologian was
 Page 47
the Summa Contra Gentiles. It is personal because in it he gave
expression to a rare public profession of his vocation as a
theologian. It is personal also in another sense. It contains a
distinctive occupation with philosophy, and especially with
Aristotelianism; so much so that historians have wondered about its
purpose, including its plan and organization. And well they might
wonder. Divided into four books, and devoted to an exposition of
the truth professed by the Catholic faith, the work proceeds in a
surprising way if it aims to be a theology. Relegating to the fourth
book the two central truths of Christianity, namely, the Trinity and
the Incarnation, it devotes the first three books to those truths of
faith that are investigable by reason; moreover, it does so in such a
way that some historians at least have wondered whether the first
three books are not philosophy whereas only the fourth book is,
properly speaking, theology.16 As
16. For the earlier bibliography on the question of the plan and
purpose of the Summa Contra Gentiles, see my introduction to the
English
(footnote continued on next page)
 Page 48
late as 1948, in the sixteenth volume of its edition of the works of
St. Thomas Aquinas, the Leonine Commission committed itself to
this interpretation of the Summa Contra Gentiles.17 One can
sympathize with such a decision without accepting it. The first
three books of the Summa Contra Gentiles are so full of
philosophical principles, analyses, and problems, that it is not easy
to remember that St. Thomas is there dealing with investigable
truths of faith. The eminent Dominican M.-D. Chenu, was, without
question, on much more solid ground when in 1950 he reasserted
the idea that the Summa Contra Gentiles was a theological work
with a deeply historical occupation, namely, the effort to meet the
(footnote continued from previous page)
translation of the first book St. Thomas Aquinas: On the Truth of the
Catholic Faith, Book One: God (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday &
Company, Inc., 1955), pp. 54-55.
On faith as having principally to do with the Trinity and the
Incarnation, see Sum. Theol. II-II, q. 1, a. 6, ad 1; a. 8; Compendium
Theologiae cc. 1-2.
17. Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Doctoris Angelici Opera Omnia . . . .
Tomus Decimus Sextus: Indices (Romae: apud Sedem Commissionis
Leoninae, 1948), pp. 285-93.
 Page 49
new Aristotelianism confronting the Christian world in general and
Christian theology in particular.18
Anyone who is willing to accept St. Thomas' word for what he is
doing can scarcely disagree with Father Chenu. St. Thomas has
said more than once that, in writing the Summa Contra Gentiles, he
is concerned with the two kinds of truth revealed by God to men.
There is the order of truth about God that men can arrive at by
rational investigation but which, in the concrete circumstances of
human life, it would be enormously difficult for them to reach;
there is also the order of truth that men can never come to know but
that they need to know if they are to direct themselves properly to
the destiny for which in fact God has created them. The existence
of God, the doctrine of a free creation, and the notion of a divine
providence creatively present in the universe are the outstanding
examples of the first
18. M.-D. Chenu, O.P., Introduction à l'étude de sainte Thomas
d'Aquin (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1950), pp. 247-54.
 Page 50
order of truths; the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation are
the chief examples of the second order. It was St. Thomas' aim to
show, by demonstration in relation to the first order of truths and by
authority in relation to the second, not only the validity of the
claims of Christianity as a religion but also the internal unity of the
Christian world of truth; and he undertook to show this unity by
setting forth the harmony between the truths about God reachable
by demonstration and the truths knowable to man only by
revelation.19
And yet the very form of the Summa Contra Gentiles offers a
serious puzzle to the modern historian. Given that the work is a
theology, it yet postpones the central truths of Christianity to the
fourth and last book. On the other hand, the later Summa
Theologiae was to unfold the whole history of man and the
universe by beginning with the Trinity and ending with the
Incarnation and its consequences.
19. See especially Summa Contra Gentiles (=S.C.G.), I, c. 7.
 Page 51
If both summae are theologies, how is it that they are organized so
differently? How is it that as a theology the Summa Contra
Gentiles spends so much of its time on those Christian truths that
fall under revelation but are demonstrable? These are unavoidable
questions, requiring the student of St. Thomas to distinguish
between the specific human purposes of the two summae and to
define with some precision the aim that governs the Summa Contra
Gentiles as a theology.
There may be many ways of formulating the human purpose of the
Summa Contra Gentiles, depending on the particular teaching of
the work that happens to interest the student. But St. Thomas' very
willingness to devote three out of its four books to those doctrines
of the Christian faith that are also demonstrable and can fall within
the range of philosophy is noteworthy to the point of being the
outstanding phenomenon in the whole work as a theology.20 What
was St. Thomas' human
20. In spite of this fact, it has recently been proposed that the S.C.G.
has no historical
(footnote continued on next page)
 Page 52
purpose? What objective did he have in mind? As a working
hypothesis I shall propose here the view that the Summa Contra
Gentiles was written at the very same crossroad where Duhem had
already found St. Thomas, but it was written by a man who wished
to stand among the philosophers as a theologian and who had
something both to learn and to teach in their presence.
From Aristotle especially St. Thomas wished to learn the nature
and technical order of philosophy. What did a philosophical
examination of the universe and of man consist in, and what
destiny did Aristotle hold up for men in the name of their
intelligence and therefore in that of philosophy itself? What did
Aristotle have to say about the nature of God and His
(footnote continued from previous page)
purpose and no historical roots in its age. See the introduction of R.
A. Gauthier, O.P., to the first volume of the now complete Latin-
French edition of the S.C.G.: Saint Thomas d'Aquin: Contra Gentiles,
Livre Premier, trans. R. Bernier and M. Corvez, Intro. R. A. Gauthier
(Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1961), pp. 87-123.
 Page 53
relations to the universe, including His relations to man? These
things St. Thomas wanted to learn in order to enter into the same
truths as a theologian and to show wherein, after the errors and the
misdirections of the philosophers had been removed, the aim of
philosophy was contained and verified within the theology that he
himself professed. Believing in the unity of truth, indeed, in the
divine origin of the very principles with which the human intellect
was endowed, St. Thomas went so far as to hold that whatever was
opposed to these principles was contrary to the divine wisdom.21
How, then, could the Christian faith contradict or oppose
21. ''Item. Illud idem quod inducitur in animam discipuli a docente,
doctoris scientia continet: nisi doceat ficte, quod de Deo nefas est
dicere. Principiorum autem naturaliter notorum cognitio nobis
divinitus est indita: cum ipse Deus sit nostrae auctor naturae. Haec
ergo principia etiam divina sapientia continet. Quicquid igitur
principiis huiusmodi contrarium est, divinae sapientiae contrariatur.
Non igitur a Deo esse potest. Ea igitur quae ex revelatione divina per
fidem tenentur, non possunt naturali cognitioni esse contraria.''
(S.C.G. I, c. 7, #2.)
 Page 54
the truths of Aristotle or fear his demonstrations?
The notion that seems to have united St. Thomas' effort as a
theologian into a single overall objective, dominating not only his
doctrinal synthesis but also his Christian apologetic before the bar
of human intelligence, was the nature and meaning of the divine
transcendencethe transcendence of that God Whom the
philosophers had made remote in order to free Him from the
vicissitudes of the universe, but Whom St. Thomas wished to
make, in the name of His very transcendence, an intimately present
God, a God Who was involved in His creatures and Who went
before them in all that they were and did. The doctrine of a creative
divine providence, infinitely transcendent and yet immanent in the
world, was the frontier to which St. Thomas wished to lead the
philosophers and philosophy itself. Indeed, it was more than a
frontier, being a new world for philosophy and a new awakening
for human intelligence. How did a man philosophize in a world
 Page 55
that was not only the orderly universe known to the great ancient
philosophers, but also the voice of a creating God addressing itself
to man as a person and evoking from him the awareness that he
was living in the world as in the presence of a personal creator and
that he could live there, in such a mysterious presence, only by
engaging and committing himself as a person?
On the whole, we have not been sufficiently aware of the
personalism of St. Thomas' thought and particularly of the
personalism to which he opened the philosophy of Aristotle. We
have tended to look at the teaching of the Summa Contra Gentiles
more or less impersonally and to take for granted the Christian
world within which St. Thomas made Aristotle into the
Philosopher. As a result, we have tended not to see the intellectual
revolution that is going on before our eyes. We are not surprised
that St. Thomas makes the Prime Mover of Aristotle into the God
of Christianity, the perfect Being Who is also a free creator and a
loving providence;
 Page 56
nor are we surprised that St. Thomas has changed the Aristotelian
ethics into an ethics of this life, imperfect and temporal in its
beatitude, but looking beyond the present to the perfect beatitude of
eternal life. And yet, these changes are more than mere corrections
or even transformations of Aristotelian philosophical notions, and
St. Thomas did more than improve Aristotelian doctrine in the
process of making it Christian. The most radical part of his
accomplishment, and one that we scarcely see, is that he created the
human intellectual climate within which Aristotle could be
transformed into the Philosopher.
For the first time in its history Aristotelianism became, in the world
of St. Thomas, a new reality; it became a personalist philosophy, a
philosophy that, in its intellectual impulse and movement, was
open to the presence of a transcendent creator within man's
intelligence. St. Thomas transformed Aristotelianism in this radical
way because as a theologian he could receive the historical
Aristotle into Christianity only through the medi-
 Page 57
ation of such a step. Otherwise, he could not teach or enforce one
of the dearest aims of his theology, namely, to show to the
philosophers that a properly conducted philosophy would end, even
when it did not know it, within the world of the divine revelation.
When, in the mind of St. Thomas, Aristotelianism began to serve
the intellectual life of man on his way to God, seeking his perfect
good in God and only in God, it was speaking in the name of a new
human reality, invested with all the personal awareness of an
intellectual creature living in the world of time and history and
seeking to locate itself in the presence of God. To enable
Aristotelianism to participate as a philosophy in such an outcome,
St. Thomas had to create its informing spirit and purpose and he
had to recreate Aristotelianism in the image of that spirit and that
purpose.
It is not difficult to see, in doctrinal terms, the transformation
accomplished by St. Thomas in the fundamental areas of
Aristotelian teachingin metaphysics and physics, and in psychology
and ethics.
 Page 58
Where the Aristotelian highest science had been a science of the
first or highest substances, in St. Thomas it became the science of
all being seen in terms of existence.22 Where the Aristotelian world
of motion had been an eternal order of nature ruled by an
intelligence that was its unknowing final cause, it became with St.
Thomas a world created and governed by an intelligence that was
as free as it was intimately involved in its creatures.23 Where, in
the Aristotelian conception of man, animal life and intelligence had
never been brought together within a unitary conception of human
life, man became successfully unified as a philosophical reality
when St. Thomas set out to
22. See E. Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (2nd ed.: Toronto:
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1952), pp. 41-73, 154-89.
On Aristotle, see also the conclusions of J. Owens, The Doctrine of
Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics (2nd ed.; Toronto: Pontifical
Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1963), pp. 455-73.
23. See S.C.G. II, cc. 6-22; to be compared with S.C.G. I, cc. 13-22, for
the basis of the doctrine, and with S.C.G. III, cc. 1, 17-21, 37-40, 48-53,
64-70, for its consequences.
 Page 59
show, not how an animal can be intelligent, but how a certain type
of intelligence was endowed with sensibility and needed to be
incarnated in matter.24
When we turn to the Nicomachean Ethics, in which Aristotle
outlines the nature and conditions of human happiness, it is much
easier to know what St. Thomas did with his teaching than what
Aristotle had really meant by it. Did Aristotle really believe that the
final destiny of man lay in the present life and that man achieved
his share in immortality here and now? But how could he think, as
he did,25 that beatitude was man's perfect good and still believe
that man could reach it in the present life? And why speak at all of
man's perfect good unless there was some prospect of reaching it?
And yet, if man was not endowed with a personal intellectual soul
that was incorruptible and capable of surviving the body, what
other life
24. See A. C. Pegis, At the Origins of the Thomistic Notion of Man
(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1963).
25. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I, 7. 1097a7.
 Page 60
could man look forward to? In the presence of these Aristotelian
issues, St. Thomas made the Ethics into a treatise dealing with the
happiness of man in this life. He did so as a theologian, recognizing
as an interpreter of Aristotle that he was bypassing some embattled
problems in order to make the Ethics a usable work in the Christian
world.26
Between the philosophy of Aristotle as so transformed and
Christian theology there intervened what I can only call the human
reality in whose image the transformation was made. That St.
Thomas managed the text of Aristotle in this process can scarcely
be contested; that the management was inspired by the deepest
religious motives is likewise beyond dispute. But perhaps St.
Thomas' religious motives required him to go much further than
freeing Aristotle from his errors and shortcomings. The unity of
truth was at stake, and while a corrected Aristotle may
26. I have tried to establish this point elsewhere ("St. Thomas and the
Nicomachean Ethics," Mediaeval Studies, XXV [1963], 10-17).
 Page 61
not have spoken any errors, he could not have spoken the truth as
St. Thomas understood it. He spoke that truth only because St.
Thomas created it and directed Aristotelian philosophy to speak it.
What St. Thomas transformed Aristotle into contains both the
historical Aristotle and the vision of intelligence and philosophy
that is St. Thomas' own. That vision is rooted in the doctrine of
creation, of man seen as an intellectual creature living under the
providence of a creating God, of his life conceived as a way to this
God, and of philosophy itself as reflecting the intellectual record of
man's personal journey to Him. If the intervening human reality
created by St. Thomas, being a means to a religious purpose, is not
always visible in its own right, still, for those who will look for it, it
is visible in its substance and its results; it is visible as an
intellectual bridge created by a theologian in the only way that was
worthy of both theology and philosophy, as the ideal of a human
reality that could be received by faith and that could, in turn,
receive Aristotle.
 Page 62

VI
At this date it does not seem necessary to argue that the idea of
creation played a decisive role in these and other transformations of
the philosophy of Aristotle. But there are two aspects of the work
of St. Thomas, both decisive for philosophy, that stand out just as
soon as we recognize that God is creatively present in the universe
as the author of its existence, its motion, and its finality. The
universe is directed by a personal God to Whom man is related as a
person in his very creature-hood. If this is an obvious Christian
truth, let us also note with St. Thomas a not-so-obvious
consequence, namely, the divine initiative within creation. But for
that initiative, things would not be, they would not act, they would
not tend to their end; with that initiative, things are in a state of
return to their endindeed, they are being returned by their author.
This is what it means for them to be: to be being returned to their
end by their creator.27
27. S.C.G. III, cc. 1 and 64.
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There is more. By His presence in the universe as creator, God
gives to the world a historical character in its very existence
unknown to Aristotelianism. A created world is a historical one in
its being, since for it to be is to be on the way to its end. As a
creature, the world exists within the government of the divine
providence, its motion and order constitute a long journey to its
destiny and man is a part of that historical journey, a part and even
its peak.28 Here begins the personalism of the Thomistic
conception of man and of philosophy. Born within a created
universe, and under the impulse of a creating and initiating divine
providence, man is face to face with a historical vision of himself,
and especially of his intelligence and his liberty, that Aristotle had
never known. To live according to what was best in him, namely,
his intelligence, was for the Aristotelian man a noble destiny, and
however much it was a more-than-human goal, it was a life in
which he could share. But,
28. S.C.G. III, c. 22.
 Page 64
in the end, while the life of intelligence somehow introduced man
into the world of divinity, it remained a self-enclosed destiny: man
escaped from his concrete humanity to his intelligence and there, in
the life of contemplation, he experienced divinity. This is already a
high ideal, but it is not that of St. Thomas Aquinas; or, rather, St.
Thomas saw this ideal as a step to another and infinitely higher
one. As a creature, human intelligence lives not only in the
company of divinity but also in its transcendent presence. How can
an intellectual creature not awake as a person to this creative
presence of God within his intelligence and his will? How can his
intellectual life, including the love that overflows from it, not
become a personal dialogue with his hidden but present creator?
And how, in this dialogue, can man not see himself as a respondent
in a personal encounter rather than merely as an observer of the
universe? How can he not recognize himself as a person whose
affirmations and negations, whose commitments and engagements
by means of those
 Page 65
absolute words yes and no, take precedence in him over the
rationality of his gaze? What, then, is an intellectual creature but a
person in a state of response to his creator, and what is the life of
such a creature except the long history of the growth of that
response?
There is still more. For such an approach to man, which can be
seen unfolding with dramatic intensity in the third book of the
Summa Contra Gentiles, transforms both the conditions of man's
pursuit of beatitude and the very philosophy in which, as a man, he
expresses that pursuit. True enough, St. Thomas presents the
problem of human beatitude as a theology of human destiny. We
are everywhere aware that man's pursuit of beatitude not only
began in God's pursuit of man but is likewise anticipated, every
step of the way, by this ever-present, initiating, and persistent God.
How much God is doing for man in order that man may seek and
find beatitude! From this point of view, the central teaching of the
Summa Contra Gentiles is that God is beatitude and that
 Page 66
He has given to man a nature that only He can satisfy. Related to
His intellectual creature as a creator and a sustaining providence,
God precedes all of man's steps to Him in order to make them
possible; and, in a supreme and unfathomable decision, God has
related Himself to man as Savior, crossing from infinity to the
world of time that man might not despair in his search for beatitude
and lose his way. The Incarnation is therefore the culminating
moment of St. Thomas' argument in the presence of philosophy.
The Incarnation raises the intellectual creature to a historical
destiny that it could not otherwise know or reach, but it also opens
the vision of the philosophersand especially the Aristotelians,
Christian and non-Christian aliketoward the direction in which the
mystery of human beatitude lies. The philosophers could not know
that God in fact would give man beatitude and that the Incarnation
was to be the channel of this gift. But, in the name of man's
intellectual nature, they could come to know with certainty that
man can have only God
 Page 67
as his end and he can live within this supreme mystery of human
existence in the confidence that God would answer appropriately
the questions He had Himself raised in creating the intellectual
nature of man.29
Within this theological vision of man and his destiny it is possible
to see the remarkable change effected by St. Thomas Aquinas
within Aristotelianism as a philosophy. Having made it into a
philosophy that could speak for man the creature in the presence of
his creator, he gave to its intellectual movement the historical shape
and direction of a personal reality that was a spiritual journey, a
questioning search
29. On beatitude and the Incarnation, see S.C.G. IV, 54. The
interpretation of S.C.G. III adopted here departs from the well-known
views of Cajetan, recently reasserted by R. A. Gauthier, loc. cit., pp.
103-20; my reason is the one that enabled Bañes finally to disagree
with Cajetan. Within a highly adjusted discussion Bañes correctly
maintains that, according to St. Thomas, the desire of the intellect for
beatitude is the desire to see God. See D. Bañes, Scholastica
Commentaria in Primam Partem (MadridValencia: 1934), I, p. 1, q.
12, a. 1, ad 5 (p. 251, col 2).
 Page 68
for location within the world of the divine providence rather than
merely an objective exposition of abstract notions, a search that
would give to the endlessness of time a human image and therefore
a human ending within time itself. Man cannot give himself
beatitude? No, being a creature, he cannot. But, yet, he can give
himself the idea of a perfect good and he can know that such a
good contains his beatitude. Aristotle knew as much, as St. Thomas
was aware,30 so that the Christian problem of the latter was how to
incorporate the philosophical notion of a perfect good within the
supernatural view of man's present life as a via to the patria of
eternal beatitude. Clearly, Aristotle's perfect good could not be
identified with either of the terms of the Christian conception of
beatitude. It was not eternal life, but neither was it the beatitude of
the Christian way-farer. It was, more than anything else, a
30. See St. Thomas, In Decem Libros Ethicorum Aristotelis ad
Nicomachum Expositio, ed. R. M. Spiazzi (Turin-Rome: Marietti,
1949), Lib. 1, lect. 9, nos. 106, 107, 111, 129.
 Page 69
human reality, man's own vision of beatitude, the perfect good of
his intellectual nature; as such, it was not an end for man to seek.
He could live in it as in the constant dream of his nature; he could
seek to live more and more in its mystery, but he could not seek it.
For he could not reach it, and he knew this, and yet he also knew it
to be the end of his nature. How, then, did St. Thomas visualize
man's relation to his perfect good? What could he do if he knew
that it was his good and that he could not reach it?
What we are looking for, in asking these questions, is the Thomistic
conception of the end of man and of the end of philosophy seen
from the side of man himself. Toward an end that he knows and
cannot reach, toward a beatitude that he knows and cannot give to
himself, what can man do that will give to his life an ending, but an
ending that neither exceeds man's power nor surrenders his vision
of the good of his nature? To ask these questions is to ask what, if
anything, philosophy has to say about the end of man; and since,
 Page 70
whatever this be, it is also the goal at which philosophy itself is
aiming, we are here asking one and the same question. To this
question St. Thomas has given, as I believe, an answer that is as
permanently true in its humanity as it is absolutely new within
Aristotelianism.
The first part of the answer consists in recognizing an extraordinary
fact about philosophy: it is, as such, an endless enterprise. Insisting
with Aristotle that man's ultimate felicity or beatitude is to be found
only in the contemplation of divine things, to which the last part of
philosophy is devoted, St. Thomas asks in what knowledge of God
this contemplation consists. It does not consist in the ordinary and
confused knowledge of God that men have almost by nature, nor in
the demonstrative knowledge that some men (including
philosophers) have of the universe and God, nor still in the firm but
obscure knowledge that the Christian believer has of God.31 But
consider what this means. To eliminate
31. S.C.G. III, cc. 37-40.
 Page 71
these sources of human knowledge in our search for beatitude is to
do nothing less than to eliminate, in principle, all the possible
candidates of man's present life to the title. We can certainly agree
that the famous man in the street can have many ill-defined ideas
about God, just as we can agree that the believer is not in
possession of his beatitude as long as he is walking by faith toward
it. But what about the philosopher? Where does he stand in relation
to the contemplation of God in which beatitude somehow consists?
The philosopher can prove the existence of God and on this basis
he can go on to study the divine nature. But the philosophical
knowledge of God, as St. Thomas sees it, does not contain man's
ultimate felicity for three decisive reasons. Whatever its value, it is
not common to all men, in fact, only a few men are able to have a
philosophical knowledge of God, whereas felicity is a good open to
all men.32 Worse still, a philosophical knowledge of
32. S.C.G. III, c. 39, #2.
 Page 72
God, proceeding by demonstration from a knowledge of the things
that make up this universe, is soon face to face with a remarkable
phenomenon. Though it can know that God exists, it cannot know
what He is; indeed, this is so true that the total unknowability of
God's nature to man is the highest result that philosophy can reach;
so that, having proved the existence of God, the great effort of
philosophy is to reach God in His eminence and transcendence
beyond creationto reach Him by unsaying progressively all the
things in the universe that the human mind can know and know
also that they are not God. In a remarkable sentence St. Thomas has
written: ''Hoc ipsum est Deum cognoscere, quod nos scimus nos
ignorare de Deo quid sit: to know God consists in this, that we
know we do not know what God is.''33 Clearly, human beatitude
cannot consist in
33. In Librum Beati Dionysii De Divinis Nominibus, ed. C. Pera
(Turin-Rome: Marietti, 1950), Cap. VII, lect. 4, #731. Cf. S.C.G. III,
49, #9: ". . . quid vero sit (scil. Deus) penitus manet ignotum." See
especially, for the doctrine as a whole, In Boeth. De Trin.
(footnote continued on next page)
 Page 73
this exalted but still dark night of the human intellect. Finally, the
philosophical knowledge of God, which ends in this unknowing as
in its peak, suffers in its ordinary life from all the ills of the human
intellect. Ignorance, error, uncertainty, inquiry that is unending and
piecemeal, never final and therefore without repose, accompanied
by the anguish and suffering of man in this intellectual sea without
a port on its horizonthese are man's ordinary companions in the
philosophical life; so that, whatever be the consolations that invite
the philosopher to liveand even to want to liveamong such risks, at
least we can be sure that the desire that drives him as a philosopher
lies beyond both his grasp and his ken.34
St. Thomas is not exactly alone in thinking in this way. But it is
possible that we may take this otherwise common attitude to be
pointing to a conclusion that St. Thomas does not intend. That
philosophy
(footnote continued from previous page)
q. I, a. 2 (ed. cit., pp. 64-67); q. VI, a. 3 (pp. 220-23).
34. S.C.G. III, c. 39, ###1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; c. 48, ##3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9.
 Page 74
is a fallible human work does not mean to him that it has been
superseded by the Christian revelation; that it is an endless
occupation does not mean to him that it has no human goal or
outcome; hence, the proposition that God is an infinitely better
source of truth does not mean to him that man must abandon his
own inquiry in listening to God's invitation to beatitude or that the
philosophical effort to see man's own vision of his destiny through
to the end has been rendered historically obsolete by the divine
message. How could this be true for St. Thomas Aquinas? After
defending in the most absolute way possible the unity of truth and
the incorporation of the principles of human intelligence within his
theology, how could he abandon the human search for beatitude in
midstream? And how could he do it in the name of God's offer of
eternal life? If the Christian revelation is in the world not as a rival
to any human philosophy but as a transcendent invitation to the
truth, how can this invitation not open and even urge philosophy to
seek to understand and
 Page 75
to achieve itself according to the exigencies of its nature? What is
that achievement?
After going over all the possibilities of this life in seeking man's
beatitude, St. Thomas has evidently reached an ultimate moment in
his inquiry. Where, then, does beatitude lie? There are three things
that we know at this critical moment that enable us to take another
step. Man's desire of an ultimate beatitude is nothing less than the
desire of the perfect good and nothing short of it. Man's desire is
fulfillable because he has the intellectual capacity for it, thought
not the power to reach it.35 Last and far from least, the human soul
is immortal. Surviving the death of the body, it can enable man to
think that, in an afterlife about which he otherwise knows nothing
at all, his desire for beatitude can be fulfilled. These three notions
are all demonstrable truths and, being demonstrable, they raise a
question. Under such conditions, how does philosophy locate man
in the presence of beatitude? Particularly, how does that philosophy
do it
35. S.C.G. III, c. 54.
 Page 76
which has served as the human instrument within St. Thomas'
theology?
To this question there is a deeply personalist Thomistic answer;
indeed, it is doubly so, involving man the person in the presence of
a personal God. How is it that God gave to the animals all the
necessary equipment of their nature, so that they might live, protect
themselves and seek their good, and left man by comparison in a
state of helplessness? St. Thomas' answer is simple enough. In the
place of natural armor and equipment, God gave man reason and
hands by which he might provide for himself; he also gave man a
free choice by which he might be turned to his beatitude. To
achieve beatitude does not lie within his power except in one way:
he can turn to God as to a friend on the strength of a principle
known to Aristotle himself, namely, that what we can do through
our friends in a way we can do through ourselves.36 What does this
mean if
36. Sum. Theol. I-II, q. 5, a. 1. On liberum arbitrium and grace, see
S.C.G. III, c. 159; also Sum. Theol. II-II, q. 2, a. 7, ad. 3.
 Page 77
not that man can live in confidence within the world of the divine
providence, he can respond to it by the free commitment of his
liberty, and he can bring all the risks of human existence to a
supreme and personal test of himself and of his universe, indeed, of
himself in his universe? This is the decision to follow his
intelligence and his love into the mystery of the divine providence
and there to live as one returning the divine friendship. What is
more personal than such a decision or the long road leading to it?
What is more personalist than a philosophy dedicated to teaching
man that his end, the end he can share in by the use of his reason,
his hands, and his liberty, is to risk himself as a person in the
presence of God and thus to make the world of time a transcendent
encounter with that presence? Let us not forget to add that St.
Thomas gave to philosophy such a personalist spirit as a theologian
and in order to achieve the personalizing of Aristotelianism. The
result was a Christian intellectualism in which philosophy had only
to follow the personal steps of man the intel-
 Page 78
lectual creature in order to meet the descending steps of his creator.

VII
Can we learn philosophy from a theologian? This is a question that
must be asked at least by those who in our day wish to be
philosophers and to claim for themselves some legitimate use of
the adjective "Thomistic" but who, at the same time, recognize that
St. Thomas himself was a theologian and created a theological
synthesis. Duhem did not find any personal philosophy in St.
Thomas Aquinas because, after he had set aside the Thomistic
theology in which philosophy lived as an instrument, there was no
philosophy that he could find. On the other hand, those who have
identified Thomistic philosophy with Aristotelianism but without
recognizing how much St. Thomas contributed to the philosophical
re-creation of the historical Aristotle, have been puzzled to know
how St. Thomas could have achieved results in philosophy that
Aristotle never did. In point of fact, he did,
 Page 79
but not for Aristotelian reasons; he did so by identifying
Aristotelianism with the spirit and the purpose of its re-creation,
and by establishing it on the principles that made this possible. In
short, St. Thomas identified Aristotle with philosophy as he himself
shaped it; he did not identify philosophy with Aristotle. As a result,
we shall never understand the Thomistic synthesis unless we make
some effort to see the personal philosophical contributions of St.
Thomas to Aristotle.
Serving as the human instrument and vehicle of a theology, itself
devoted to incorporating Aristotelian intellectualism within
Christianity, the philosophy of St. Thomas is admittedly not a very
visible reality. Yet it becomes visible when we look for it as it was
within the Thomistic synthesis and if we make an effort to accept it
on its own terms. As such, it was not a philosophy, but the
intellectual body of a theology: it was not man speaking with his
intelligence about God and the universe, it was the Christian
revelation incarnating itself in human intelligence in
 Page 80
order to speak divine truths among men. This synthesis is what we
call a scholastic theology, which cannot exist without the technical
employment of philosophical principles and procedures but within
which, nevertheless, human intelligence is living a life and
following a light infinitely beyond its own. The intellectual world
of St. Thomas was a theological world of this kind, Christian in its
intellectualism and genuinely intellectual in the form and shape that
it gave to the teaching of revelation. St. Thomas thought that only
this intellectualism was the true Christian answer to the
philosophical intellectualism of Aristotletrue because the problem
at stake was to show that intellectualism had a permanent place
within Christianity and to prove to the philosophers that they had
only to be fully and unreservedly faithful to the human intellect in
order to discover even as philosophers that they were already living
within transcendent mysteries that formed part of Christian
teaching.
So understood, the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas contains within
itself
 Page 81
both a lasting Christian monument and a specific historical
occupation to which it was dedicated; moreover, our problem today
is to remain faithful to his intellectualism by recognizing the
concrete outlines of his world. We can do so by seeing that world
both as Christian and according to the cultural framework of the
thirteenth century, by recognizing his philosophy to be such as it
was in his world and not such as it needs to be in our own, and
especially by not violently disengaging the principles and the spirit
of that philosophy from the theological conditions under which St.
Thomas chose to be engaged in philosophy. Perhaps, as we look in
the writings of St. Thomas for the shape and character of his
philosophy, the most difficult thing for us to remember is that in a
world still ruled by the light of revelation, in which human culture
is nourished by faith seeking understanding, there need be no
question of distinguishing between philosophy as such and its
ministerial use within theology. St. Thomas so used philosophy,
and he never experienced any need to think of philoso-
 Page 82
phy as a philosopher, though he knew that Aristotle, Avicenna, and
Averroes were philosophers; nor did he think it unnatural that, in
using philosophy within his theology and therefore beyond its
depth, he was doing any violence to it. If he knew that philosophy
was grounded in the light of reason, he also knew that reason and
nature were fulfilled in the world of revelation and grace to which
they were but a preamble. How could philosophy suffer in the
world that contained its destiny, even as it contained the promise of
man's destiny? Being more than a philosopher, St. Thomas gave to
his philosophy the freedom of his own theology.
And this is still our problem today. We are living in a divided world
and a divided Christianity. We are likewise living in an age of
unprecedented intellectual discovery, creation, and power when
Christianity, far from being prepared to do what it did in the
thirteenth century, namely, to receive and assimilate the high
intellectualism of antiquity, must re-enter and rediscover the world
of modern knowledge
 Page 83
before it can dream again of a Christian intellectualism such as St.
Thomas Aquinas and his fellow theologians formulated in their
day. It may be a question to know whether thirteenth-century
Christianity needed philosophers, but there can be no question that
the Christianity of our day does. That is why, in looking to St.
Thomas Aquinas for light in this need, we are face to face both
with what joins us to him and also with what separates our age
from his.
Since the beginning of the nineteenth century we have had many
Thomisms in the modern world, but perhaps in our day we have the
opportunity not only to profit from their experiences but also to
undertake a new reading of St. Thomas Aquinas and a new
assessment of our own responsibility in seeking to be philosophical
disciples of his teaching. Some one hundred years ago Thomism
was reintroduced to the world as a pure philosophy. In the present
century, and chiefly between the two great wars, it was discovered
to be a Christian philosophy owing many of its ideas to theology,
so that as a philosophy
 Page 84
it could not be separated from the religious soil in which it grew.
The name of Etienne Gilson is inseparably connected with this
view. The name of the same eminent historian is connected with the
further view held by many today that the philosophy of St. Thomas
was not only Christian in its character and spirit but also
theological in its mode of expression and development: it was, in
fact, the minister and servant of sacred teaching, forming as such
an integral part of the theological whole to which it belonged. If
this is true, then our question remains. How do we learn philosophy
from a theology?
The negative part of the answer to this question is the easier to
formulate. If, as we have already said, the Thomistic synthesis was
a theological one; if, moreover, that synthesis contained
philosophical ideas and principles in a state of ministry to theology,
philosophical in their matter and theological in their presentation;
if, finally, that synthesis contained the whole world of Aristotelian
philosophy as re-created by St. Thomas, then we must say that,
 Page 85
if Thomistic philosophy exists, it is not philosophy as employed by
theology, it is not the philosophy so employed but detached from
its employment, nor is it the historical Aristotelianism that
regularly served as St. Thomas' technical philosophical tool. What
is Thomistic philosophy after these refusals?
Here each student of St. Thomas must speak for himself. For my
own part, I would identify the philosophy of St. Thomas himself
with that personalist intellectualism that serves as the human reality
employed by the author of the Summa Contra Gentiles. It is a
philosophy spoken in theology by a theologian; it exists there in its
principles, in its overall intellectual framework, and in its
personalist direction and spirit. But it does not exist in its own
right, and under its own management, as a philosophy. The modern
student can see the principles that enabled St. Thomas to transform
Aristotle, but he cannot find the philosophy that St. Thomas would
have built had he chosen to be a philosopher. The modern student
can see that the idea
 Page 86
of creation not only transforms Aristotle into the instrument of an
existential metaphysics, it also introduces his philosophy into a
historical world ruled by a creative providence penetrating man
himself to the depths of his personal existence and awareness. So
understood, the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas aims in its very
substance to direct man's vision to his encounter with a
transcendent God within the universe; it aims, by the very
metaphysical urgency of that encounter, to locate the human person
in the known presence of an unknown God. This is the philosophy
of St. Thomas in its principles, in its aim, and, above all, in the
personalist spirit of its intellectualism. Our own problem is that this
philosophy exists in its author for a higher than human purpose.
Can we, in the conditions of our own day, given to this same
philosophy a human purpose and a human existence without
violating the theological dedication that St. Thomas himself wrote
into it in creating it?
I would like to think that the Thomists of the future will undertake
to give to the
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personalist philosophy of St. Thomas an authentic philosophical
existence in the modern world. They will do so if they are willing
to commit themselves to a purpose that St. Thomas himself never
undertook to carry out, namely, to be philosophers in their own
name and in the first person singular. The Thomism of the future, if
there is to be a Thomistic philosophy, cannot be like the Thomism
of the past, and particularly like the rationalist Thomism of the
latter nineteenth century. If the original Thomism of the thirteenth
century was not a philosophy, then there can be a philosophical
Thomism in the future only if it loses its proper name and gains the
personal engagement of living philosophers who are willing to
guide themselves as philosophers by the principles and the spirit of
the philosophy used by St. Thomas in his theology. If a man is a
philosopher and a Thomist, then he is a disciple, not of the past, but
of the present and the future; within his own world, his aim can be
only to give a genuine philosophical life to the principles that St.
Thomas used
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in another day and under other conditions of human culture.
To think of speaking of the future suggests that, in some sense, the
past has come to an end. I hope indeed that the fragmentation of St.
Thomas has come to an end. I hope that we shall undertake to build
our own Christian philosophy, not by detaching fragments from his
theology, but by risking our own intellectual lives in the world of
today. These lives will be informed by the personalist impetus of
St. Thomas' metaphysics but managed by our own engagement and
undertaken in our own name. And if we create it, our own
philosophy will be a genuine personalism, not only engaged in
everything human within its own world, but also drawing the life of
man to that edge of existence where it can be faithful to itself only
by making its knowledge and its love a dialogue with God.
Whether such a philosophy will exist in the future remains to be
seen. I am not a prophet, and I have presented it in this lecture as a
lesson from the past. There was a man in the thirteenth century who
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created the intellectualism that is the permanent source of this
ideal. Should it come into existence, it will be the philosophy of
those who create it, and it will bear their names; but it is no less
certain that the name of St. Thomas will be visible in the signatures
of his intellectual children.
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The Aquinas Lectures

Published by the Marquette University Press,
Milwaukee 3, Wisconsin
St. Thomas and the Life of Learning (1937) by Fr. John F.
McCormick, S.J., professor of philosophy, Loyola University.
St. Thomas and the Gentiles (1938) by Mortimer J. Adler, Ph.D.,
director of the Institute of Philosophical Research, San Francisco,
Calif.
St. Thomas and the Greeks (1939) by Anton C. Pegis, Ph.D.,
professor of philosophy, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies,
Toronto.
The Nature and Functions of Authority (1940) by Yves Simon,
Ph.D., professor of philosophy of social thought, University of
Chicago.
St. Thomas and Analogy (1941) by Fr. Gerald B. Phelan, Ph.D.,
professor of philosophy, St. Michael's College, Toronto.
St. Thomas and the Problem of Evil (1942) by Jacques Maritain,
Ph.D., professor emeritus of philosophy, Princeton University.
 Page 92
Humanism and Theology (1943) by Werner Jaeger, Ph.D., Litt.D.,
University professor, Harvard University.
The Nature and Origins of Scientism (1944) by John Wellmuth.
Cicero in the Courtroom of St. Thomas Aquinas (1945) by E. K.
Rand, Ph.D., Litt.D., LL.D., Pope professor of Latin, emeritus,
Harvard University.
St. Thomas and Epistemology (1946) by Fr. Louis-Marie Regis,
O.P., Th.L., Ph.D., director of the Albert the Great Institute of
Mediaeval Studies, University of Montreal.
St. Thomas and the Greek Moralists (1947, Spring) by Vernon J.
Bourke, Ph.D., professor of philosophy, St. Louis University, St.
Louis, Missouri.
History of Philosophy and Philosophical Education (1947, Fall) by
Étienne Gilson of the Académie française, director of studies and
professor of the history of Mediaeval philosophy, Pontifical
Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto.
The Natural Desire for God (1948) by Fr. William R. O'Connor,
S.T.L., Ph.D., professor of dogmatic theology, St. Joseph's
Seminary, Dunwoodie, N.Y.
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St. Thomas and the World State (1949) by Robert M. Hutchins,
Chancellor of the University of Chicago.
Method in Metaphysics (1950) by Fr. Robert J. Henle, S.J., dean of
the graduate school, St. Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri.
Wisdom and Love in St. Thomas Aquinas (1951) by Étienne Gilson
of the Académie française, director of studies and professor of the
history of Mediaeval philosophy, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval
Studies, Toronto.
The Good in Existential Metaphysics (1952) by Elizabeth G.
Salmon, associate professor of philosophy in the graduate school,
Fordham University.
St. Thomas and the Object of Geometry (1953) by Vincent Edward
Smith, Ph.D., professor of philosophy, University of Notre Dame.
Realism and Nominalism Revisited (1954) by Henry Veatch, Ph.D.,
professor of philosophy, Indiana University.
Imprudence in St. Thomas Aquinas (1955) by Charles J. O'Neil,
Ph.D., professor of philosophy, Marquette University.
The Truth That Frees (1956) by Fr. Gerard Smith, S.J., Ph.D.,
professor and chairman of the department of philosophy, Marquette
University.