More Notes On A Prospective Project

Tchaikovsky, a gay man often criticized for his art being overly European-influenced and insufficiently nationalist, was basically the same guy as Vladimir Putin, if you think about ithttps://t.co/K7VDrNPTA7

— Zack Budryk (@BudrykZack) March 9, 2022

Except for the part where one was a composer/creator of art, and the other is a brutal, clueless tyrant. Putin is closer to the same guy as Trump . They both have a talent for destruction; neither is much good at creation.

My point is not to discuss the finer points of this tweet, but to consider why some qualities are valued and analyzed, and others are dismissed out of hand.  My text, again, is The Saint & The Atheist.  I haven't really spent much time with it this week, but I did get this far:

Aquinas was fortunate in having as his teacher Albert Magnus, popularly known as Albert the Great (1193-1280).  Albert outlived Aquinas and defended his pupil's thoughts, well aware and happy that in many areas his pupil had surpassed him.  Still, it was Albert who initiated the general attempt to integrate Aristotle's view of matter into the Christian tradition.  It was not an easy task, for it was Plato's thought rather than Aristotle's that seemed tailor-made for Christianity. (Catalano, p. 7)

I really don't like mental sloppiness, and that last sentence really snags my attention more than it should.  I want to talk about Aristotle's views of matter, which is what the chapter does on to discuss; but I stumble over that "tailor-made" line.  It's rather like saying it was inevitable the "good guys" would win the war and establish a world order that already (practically within my life time, if I were only 10 years older) seems to be coming apart in Ukraine.  To people of my generation (born after the war), the outcome seems inevitable, and it takes a great act of imagination to place yourself in the days when the war might have had a very different outcome, or left a very different map of Europe.  Just so for Plato.  He was attractive to Christianity partly because of the influence of Paul, who was in some ways more Greek than Hebrew (you don't find nearly as much Greek influence in the letters not attributed to Paul; or even in Luke-Acts, for that matter.  Though there is definitely more there than in Mark, Matthew, or John.  It's almost non-existent in Mark, a little stronger in Matthew, and in some ways almost at war with "the Jews," as John's gospel calls them (in translation, anyway), by the fourth gospel.  So was Plato tailor-made for Xianity, or did Xianity pick it up along the way, the better to discuss the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth in a Greek-dominated, Gentile world?  Christianity would have been a very different matter if Paul's efforts among Gentiles had been less successful.  And, as some Biblical scholars like Krister Stendahl have argued, that Greek perspective actually misunderstood Paul (so did Augustine, who cemented Plato to Christianity; but that's another topic for another day).  Christian doctrine is very much based on Platonism (even more so on Neo-Platonism, a few centuries after Paul), but to say Platonism was tailor made for Christianity is to get the chronology precisely backwards:  it was Christianity that was tailor-made for Platonism, and indeed kept it alive long after the rest of the world had lost it.

I mention that just to give you an idea of my bias here.  I know things Catalano doesn't; or perhaps I consider things important that he doesn't.  Let's move on to the particular:

It was appropriate for thinkers of Augustine's time to write and hold discussions in monasteries, whereas in the thirteenth century there were universities with houses of study within these universities.  Aquinas thus worked in a different setting than Augustine.  On the other hand, surely Augustine had a philosophical understanding of Plato, and so what is the difference?   I think that Aquinas had to learn how to think only as far as a philosopher without the aid of faith.  This is particularly true in his commentaries on Aristotle's physics, but it also true throughout Aquinas's thinking, particularly against the Arabic and Jewish philosophers.  For example, in a short work, On the Eternity of the World, and in the Summa of Theology, Aquinas admits that God could have created the world for all eternity, still sustaining it in being so that without his presence things would fall into nothingness.  Thus, Aquinas admitted that creation in time is a matter of faith and cannot be proved by reason, "Hence that the world began to exist is an object of faith, but not of demonstration of science."  Catalano, p. 16

Little of that means what Catalano seems to think it means.  Or, I should be clear, necessarily means what he seem to think it means.

1) Until the Enlightenment, theology was still the "mother of all the sciences." I don't say that to defend theology against critique, or to offer a backhanded critique against science. I just mean to say the sharp distinction between science and theology is a recent one; and still not as clear as some want it to be.  I point to the example of Fr. LeMaitre, Jesuit priest and originator of the Big Bang theory. Or Gregor Mendel, the monk in the monastery garden with his peas.

2) So the distinction, even in the 13th century, between philosophy and theology is an utterly false one.  It's an anachronism, a retrojection into the past of modern sensibilities, which serves only to distort what is being examined, and to misunderstand it.  Aquinas certainly worked in a different setting than Augustine, but Augustine came at the collapse of the Roman Empire (hence The City of God), while Aquinas came along at the end of the Middle Ages, and died just before the Renaissance created avenues of thought and social order unimaginable to either saint.

3)  Acting without the "aid of faith" would have been unimaginable to the monk, and a category error besides.  Earlier Catalano notes about Aquinas' understanding of a human being:

Aristotle granted that the human soul was unique--the highest of all souls--capable of absorbing the forms of all natural things lower than itself; and beyond this, the human soul was, through reason, able to touch the divine.

Now clearly "the divine" would mean something quite different to Aquinas than to Aristotle, but to the saint that ability to contact the divine was possible through faith.  While reason might assist the soul in making that contact, only faith could assure it, and since contact with the divine was the highest and best goal of life (hence being a monk), that makes faith something superior even to reason.  Which is not an argument about whether Aquinas was right or wrong (not yet, anyway), but to point out Catalano is trying to slice Aquinas thinly enough that the "awkward" theological views are sheered away from the more "acceptable" philosophical ones.  And that's the crux of my argument:  that he thinks that separation is both necessary and fruitful.

4) When Aquinas doesn't invoke faith, it's not because he's trying to converse with Jewish and Arabic philosophers (who themselves probably didn't cleave their religion from their thinking; Spinoza is still 400 years in the future).  It's because the matters he is concerned with that can be understood with reason don't invoke the need of faith to discuss.  We'll see just how important that distinction is, IMHO, in a moment.

5) I'm sort of intrigued by this idea that, without the sustaining presence of God, the universe falls into nothingness.  It's subtly Greek, for one thing (there's no support for such an understanding of Creation in the Scriptures; but then the lack of God's presence, even the withdrawal of it, from Creation is not even imagined there, either.).  It's also very modern, starting at least with the works of Eliot ("The Waste Land," in particular; echoes remaining in "Ash Wednesday") and Hemingway (especially "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," which is the theme of that story).  It's common now (70 years after Hemingway) in movies and TeeVee, to write stories where the absence of God is the reason for despair and bleak resignation to the absurdity of existence (i.e., we and the world are falling into nothing). Which makes it even more interesting.

6) The counter to that is connected to faith, according to Aquinas; something else we think we have lost in the modern world.  Again, to Aquinas, such mass despair and absence of faith would have been unimaginable.  But we have to understand "faith" not as a religious concept or substitute for the world "belief," or worse as "believin' what you know ain't so."  For Aquinas faith was a trust in God reinforced by society itself, a society centered on the church, a society where anchorites like Julian of Norwich were not so unknown it takes almost a history lesson to explain what the word “anchorite” means, and what it meant to the churches and communities where they were found.  Their expression of faith was far different from the popular ones today, where faith means acceptance of certain political leaders or politics, or political issue; or it means waiting fervently for God to make you rich beyond the dreams of avarice, with never a thought for your sister or brother who is naked, hungry, or sick, and in need of no more than a moment of your attention.  A faith that sees God in every person you could help, if only with a kind word or an extra shirt or a warm meal, is not a faith that believes what you know ain't so.  It may not be a faith that can be proved by reason, but to call it unreasonable is to call into question the definition of "reason" you are using.

7) Ironically, "that the world began to exist" is a demonstration of faith; we just call it science.  The Big Bang doesn't explain how, or even that, the world began to exist.  It is a theory based on available information that posits a cause, an almost Aristotelian unmoved mover at the beginning of time; at least time as counted by the cosmic clock set ticking by the Big Bang.  Beyond that, it is no more scientific than Genesis 1 or 2.  It just draws from circumstance ("these things are here") the same presumption of origin as Genesis:  that this began earlier, and it was caused by something of which all that is now is the result, the consequence, the effect of that that initial cause.

8) I started this because the consideration of Aquinas by Catalano is not likely to end where Aquinas did.  The story is that, after completing his Summa, Aquinas had a mystical vision.  A vision of God or of heaven or of the truth of Creation, I don't know.  But the story continues that after this vision Aquinas considered all he had written (and it is a considerable thing, his Summa) to be mere straw.  He never wrote another word, devoted himself to his monastic duties, and died in his 40's.

Can you separate Aquinas's work from that vision?  Can you split the monk from his monastery, and divide the man from his mystical experience?  You can certainly discuss his understanding of matter, and being, and what it means to be human.  But can you separate his thoughts on matter from his mystical experience?  I won't say his "belief in God," because we've already separated that from discourse, we've already almost irreversibly decided that "belief" is a matter apart from the considerations of reason and not even really a proper subject for discussion outside of a wholly religious context.  So I stick to the particular, peculiar, and individual experience the saint claimed as the reason he set aside his efforts at theology (which we know trim down into "philosophy," the better to be comfortable with it).  Do we undestand Aquinas without including that?  I've read a biography of Wittgenstein with the aim of understanding his philosophy.  I've read the comments of Russell on how he thought Wittgenstein veered away from his Tractatus to mysticism (a popular interpretation of Wittgenstein which has fallen into disrepute).  Or the anecdote of Rusell coming upon Wittgenstein in a brown study, and asking mockingingly "Are you contemplating philosophy?  Or your sins?," to which is former student answered "Both." 

Should I ignore these things when considering Wittgenstein's thought?  It is often commented on that Derrida was an Algerian Jew; I met the works of Emmanuel Levinas with the identification that he was Jewish.  These were not racial matters, but matters of context, of the culture and thinking they came from. It's not a restriction on either of them to note they were Jews, anymore than it is to note Wittgenstein can be understood as a religious thinker.  So if I separate Aquinas the reasoning monk from Aquinas the mystic, am I understanding Aquinas correctly?  Or not?

Whole sight, as John Fowles wrote; or all the rest is desolation.