McGunn on the Summa Theologiae

Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae
A Biography
Bernard McGunn
(Princeton, 2014)
272 p.

The idea of writing a “biography” of a book is an odd but interesting one. Books, like persons, originate in a particular time and place, have a particular character and range of interests, and exert a certain influence in the world. Unlike the life of an individual person, the life of a great book continues over many generations, and the book has the potential to become a permanent cultural possession.

Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae is an especially daunting book. The edition I own runs to about 3000 double-columned pages in small type, and though I have often entertained the idea of reading through it in a systematic way — it is structured in such a way as to accommodate brief, step-by-step encounters — yet to this point I have done little more than dabble. Probably I’ve spent more time reading about the Summa than reading the thing itself.

McGunn discusses Thomas’ life and the circumstances under which the Summa was written. He talks about Thomas’ motives in undertaking such a massive effort and about the readers for whom it was written. He discusses several important questions relevant to our understanding of the Summa as a whole, such as Thomas’ understanding of the nature of theology, and of the relationship between philosophy and theology. Although many books on Thomas and the Summa focus on Thomas’ contributions to philosophy — his epistemology, his metaphysics, his ethics — it is fair to say that McGunn is at least and possibly more interested in his contributions to theology. This is fitting; the Summa is a book of theology.

A middle section of the book gives a superb overview of the structure of the Summa, outlining the content of its various parts. Embedded in the pages of the Summa are a variety of focused investigations of specific topics: law, ethics, creation, sacraments, Christ, and so on. McGunn helps us to see how these pieces fit together into the overall logical structure of the work.

The last half of the present book is devoted to the “biography” — that is, the history of the book and its reception after it was completed (or, in the case of the Summa, not completed). Initially Thomas’ Summa faced serious obstacles, mostly on account of his decision to couch his thought in Aristotelian terms, which were viewed with suspicion in some quarters, and certain of Thomas’ propositions were condemned by some ecclesiastical authorities. But the Dominicans took a special pride in Thomas’ accomplishments, and adopted the Summa for educational purposes from an early date. By the sixteenth century Thomas’ star had risen high enough for Luther to designate the Catholic Church as “the Thomistic church” (and, with his usual perspicacity, he identified St Thomas as “the source and foundation of all heresy, error, and obliteration of the Gospel”). The rumour (repeated by Pope Leo XIII) that the Summa was on the altar next the Bible at the Council of Trent McGunn says is false, but Thomas did continue to accumulate honours: in 1567 Pope St Pius V named him a Doctor of the Church — the first person to be so honoured since the patristic period — and toward the end of the sixteenth century the Jesuits adopted Thomas as their official theologian; several of the most important commentaries on the Summa were written by Jesuits (viz. Suarez). But with the passing of time the Summa eventually fell on hard times. The work itself was eclipsed in the scholarly mind by commentaries upon it, and these eventually grew so weighty and dry that they became, in the early modern period, objects of scorn. The rise of modern philosophy occurred without the Summa being a point of reference (except perhaps for Descartes, at second or third hand). McGunn says, incredibly, that when, in the mid-nineteenth century, John Henry Newman wanted to read it, he couldn’t find a copy.

These declining fortunes were reversed by the election of a Thomist to the papacy in the latter-half of the nineteenth-century. In 1879 Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical Aeterni Patris, in which he praised St Thomas as the Christian philosopher par excellence and recommended not only his example but also his particular ideas as of special and enduring value to the Church. From this point, Catholic intellectuals began to engage with the thought of St Thomas again in an especially intense way. Intense, but far from uniform. The hope of Leo XIII that Thomism could provide a united front with which the Church could contend against the manifold errors of the modern world was not realized, for there turned out to be not just Thomism, but Thomisms, and an interesting section of the book traces these different schools over the course of the twentieth century. There were those who saw Thomism as a kind of trans-historical philosophical vantage point, such as Garrigou-Lagrange. There were those who sought, on the contrary, to understand St Thomas and his contributions in historical context while retaining an interest in his modern relevance (Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain). And there were others who sought to put Thomas into conversation with modern philosophy (Bernard Lonergan, Karl Rahner). These names are all familiar — I am especially fond of Gilson — but it is helpful to see them placed on a map.

Vatican II, inadvertently or not, brought about a decline in the centrality of St Thomas for Catholic thought. It is tempting to see this as another instance of the oft-repeated pattern whereby the post-Conciliar Church, by a kind of infallible clumsiness, allowed her treasures to fall into neglect. I don’t think it healthy that the Church’s intellectual life be identified strongly with one particular framework, but of all possible frameworks which could maintain a lively presence in the Church’s intellectual life, that of St Thomas is a rich and worthy one. In Fides et Ratio, Pope St John Paul II taught that the Church has no official philosophy, but recommended St Thomas as an exemplar of Catholic intellectual life.

**

I read the book at a leisurely pace, and enjoyed it very much. McGunn is not himself a Thomist, so he brings an outsider’s perspective, which might be advantageous in some respects. Of course, nobody is free of prejudices, and some of his do come through, not all of which were appealing to me. I got the general feeling that McGunn doesn’t love Thomas quite as much as he ought to. But overall I did find it a worthwhile and interesting book.

The cover of the book, shown above, reproduces Filippo Lippi’s The Dispute of St Thomas, which one can see in the Cappella Carafa at Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, a chapel which I have visited every time I’ve been to the Eternal City and which is dear to my heart.

**

This volume is part of an ongoing series issued by Princeton University Press of “biographies” of great religious books. Other entries in the series include the Book of Common Prayer, Augustine’s Confessions, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and books from outside the Judeo-Christian tradition too, such as the Bhagavad Gita. I expect many of those would be worthwhile too.

Vodolazkin: Laurus

Laurus
Evgeny Vodolazkin
Translated from the Russian by Lisa Hayden
(Oneworld, 2015) [2013]
362 p.

The press surrounding Laurus has been so positive, and the book made to sound so intriguing, that it succeeded in coaxing me out from under my rock to buy a copy. First published in Russia in 2013, it accumulated a pile of literary awards, and the English translation appeared last year, accompanied by a chorus of praise.

The novel is about a fifteenth-century Russian healer named Arseny. He is a physician, of sorts, though he himself is uncertain how much of his success is due to his medicines and how much to the touch of his own hands. He travels from place to place, even making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. His name changes several times; he accepts whatever name those around him wish to use, but it also happens that each name change corresponds to a change in his way of life.

It is probably fair to see Arseny as an example of a “holy fool”: a saintly figure whose eccentricities both divide him from others and endear him to them. He lives alone much of the time, often under very ascetic conditions, on the outskirts of towns, even in a graveyard. He dresses in rags, his hair is dishevelled, he eats hardly at all, he seeks the company of the dead, yet he has a penetrating knowledge of hearts, and of the future, and people stream to him for cures.

Figures of this sort have appeared in sacred tradition, but, unless I am mistaken, there is usually something opaque about them. They fascinate precisely because they are so out of the ordinary; we can hardly imagine what is going on in their heads. Laurus is a remarkable example of an attempt to get inside such a character.

One of the more interesting aspects of the story is how it plays with time: telescoping it, folding it back on itself, collapsing the distinction between past and future. Several characters in the story have foreknowledge of future events, and Arseny sometimes simultaneously experiences himself at different stages of his life. The language of the book reflects this: the narrator speaks sometimes in Chaucerian English, sometimes in a traditional narrative voice, and sometimes in modern slang, sometimes all of them in the span of a single sentence. This is an intriguing literary device, although I admit that I am not quite sure why Vodolazkin has done this. It might be an attempt to suggest that a saint, as he approaches God, begins to experience something like the Eternal “now” of God’s timelessness.

Early in the book Arseny does something which leads to the death of one whom he loves, and this becomes the catalyst for his internal transformation, as he seeks to atone for his sins and those of his beloved. His life becomes one long exercise in the extinction of his ego, until he becomes a kind of window through which others see something radiant. He himself does not really see it. This course of self-denial reaches an apex in a remarkable scene in which he is given an opportunity to re-live that original, fatal decision, and when he chooses rightly it is at the cost of his last shreds of self-possession and respectability.

There is a good deal of religious content in the book. Some have claimed that the experience of reading it has led them to prayer, but I cannot say that was true of me. In fact, although Arseny is clearly an Orthodox Christian, there is relatively little Christian language in the book (there is some), and his spiritual life is not especially clearly focused on traditional Christian elements (as, for example, Christ, or the Church, or the Blessed Virgin, or grace). Alan Jacobs, usually an astute commentator on literary matters, described the book’s spiritual climate as being closer to Hunduism than Christianity; this strikes me as an odd and overly strong claim, but there may be a hint of something to it.

What bothered me most about the book was its tendency to be a bit quirky. I kept thinking of the magical realism of writers like Salman Rushdie or Umberto Eco — wonderful writers (and Vodolazkin, to the extent that he can be judged in translation, is a very fine writer too), but lacking in heft.

Overall, though, I did enjoy the novel, and I found that it improved as it progressed. I’d recommend it.

**

This review, from the New Yorker, is quite good.

Heidegger

By Davide Calandrini

Introducing Heidegger
Jeff Collins and Howard Selina
(Icon, 1998)
173 p.

Heidegger
A Very Short Introduction
Michael Inwood
(Oxford, 2002)
160 p.

Many years ago I embarked on a reading of Frederick Copleston’s eleven-volume history of philosophy, with the intention of reading it alongside a judicious selection of primary sources. Somewhere along the way — roundabout Volume 7, I think, or, put another way, roundabout the time I became a father — that project stalled. Consequently, I never did get to Martin Heidegger.

It would be fair to say that my preparation for reading Heidegger has been inadequate. I have no particular grounding in continental philosophy. I’ve never read Husserl or the other phenomenologists who influenced Heidegger. I’ve not read Foucoult or Derrida or the other gurus whom Heidegger influenced. For some time, however, I have become interested in him on account of the frequency with which his name has appeared in interesting contexts: in connection with Terrence Malick’s films, for instance, or in the philosophical theology of David Bentley Hart. From those sources I had inferred that Heidegger was, in some sense, the modern philosopher of being. Therefore I had mentally paired him with Aquinas, whom I think of as the medieval philosopher of being, and I surmised that reading him might contribute fruitfully to my more-or-less haphazard but more-or-less persistent ruminations on being, beauty, contemplation, and love.

**

Heidegger has a reputation as a difficult thinker. Insofar as I can tell, this is well deserved. In a sense, his writing is intentionally confounding, for one of his objectives was to subvert and overcome the conventional thinking of the Western philosophical tradition, most especially in its rationalist streams, and so he adopted a quasi-poetic, non-dialectical, non-analytic manner. This was not totally unprecedented in our tradition; arguably, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche adopted similar, if far more elegant, methods, but Heidegger himself seems to have looked to the pre-Socratic philosophers, like Heraclitus, for inspiration.

**

Both of these short introductory volumes emphasize that Heidegger’s central question was: what is being? (Thus confirming those rumours that had drawn me hither.) He thought that the West, starting with Plato, had forgotten being, and had instead devoted itself to mastering and manipulating (even if only through understanding) beings. We habitually focus on what things are, rather than on the fact that they are. Heidegger believed that the proper task of philosophy should be to draw attention back to this more fundamental question: what is being?

His pursuit of an answer — if indeed he pursued an answer in the conventional sense, which is doubtful — took him in directions that were surprising, at least to me. I would have expected that to answer his foundational question he would have turned to metaphysics, as Aquinas did, but, as I have learned, this way was blocked to him, for metaphysics belonged to the tradition he was challenging. He took a different tack: he focused on experience. He put human beings, and their particular ways of being in the world, at the center of his project. He used an odd word, Dasein, which means literally “there-being”, to refer to the thing we are — an unfamiliar word which he could proceed to define according to his own vision. He did not mean by this word a biological creature, but something expansive: “Dasein [is] that entity in its being which we know as human life; this entity in the specificity of its being, the entity that we each ourselves are, which each of us finds in the fundamental assertion: I am.”

And so he situates himself not in a lofty or abstract vantage point, but within the experience of being alive and conscious and human, and he starts there. His is therefore a philosophy “from the inside out”, if I can put it that way. It is here that the phenomenologists, with their careful attention to the shape and texture of lived human experience, inform his philosophy directly. For instance, when he discusses time — a very important part of his philosophy, as reflected in the title of his most important book — he challenges the linear model of time and its usual division into past, present, and future, for time is not actually lived in that neat way. Instead, the past is always present to us, both in memory and in the world as we receive it, and the future is present to us as we ponder its possible not-yets. The flow of time, too, is more flexible than the objective scientific view would indicate, for sometimes — in the company of good friends, for instance — time is experienced as passing quickly — but at other times — when attending a lecture on Heidegger, for instance — it is experienced as crawling along slowly. Or, to take another case, we do not experience space as geometric in the Cartesian manner, but a person who is distant can be brought near in experience if we see their photo or hear their voice on the phone.

Now, to a certain way of thinking, approaching fundamental questions about being in this way seems misguided and counterproductive. Instead of using the resources of objective, abstract reason, Heidegger has intertwined his inquiry with the peculiarities of human psychology. It’s a muddle. I am sympathetic to this appraisal, but, at the same time, I do not want to jump to conclusions. Before judging, we must do our best to really understand him, and this means taking seriously his critique of the “objective, abstract” principles on the basis of which we would judge him. I admit I’m not sure how to do that, but I if he is truly digging out the foundations, and succeeds, then the objection may not stand. And, to be fair, there is something inside-out about the rationalist tendency to give priority to objective, “scientific” concepts over subjective experience, when those very concepts have been formulated entirely within the framework of such experience, and are only ever present to us in the prior and enveloping context of such experience. Perhaps it is right, therefore, to see the experiential side as philosophically prior, and the objective side as a more or less brittle gloss. (I stop short of claiming this to be Heidegger’s reasoning; I’m simply not sure what he would say about it.)

Speaking of digging out the foundations, Heidegger challenged the usual notion of truth as “correspondence” between ideas and things, along with the concomitant notion that ideas are true or false. (Alarm bells begin to ring; this is a classic self-defeating view. But wait…) Instead, he proposes the notion of truth as “unconcealing”, in which beings are revealed to us in one or another of their aspects, and to varying degrees, at different times and in different contexts. On this view, truth is not saying or thinking the right things about objects, but a process or experience of disclosure or revelation. Our proper attitude is one of reception and attention, rather than judgement. We open ourselves to being, rather than imposing a conceptual framework upon it. Crucially, this is not actually a contradiction of the “correspondence” idea of truth, but rather a preamble to it, conceptually and experientially prior, for unless beings first disclose themselves to us, in the play of light and shadow of unconcealing, in the “field of relatedness”, we cannot know them at all, much less formulate true or false propositions concerning them. On the other hand, this notion of “unconcealing” is not one that we can test empirically to see if it is right, for this would put the cart before the horse, trying to slip the correspondence theory of truth into a crack where it cannot fit. Unconcealing can only be experienced, not verified.

As these reflections suggest, implicit in Heidegger’s view of being is a critique of technology — not of any particular technology, but of the technological mindset. For the tendency of the technological approach to the world, informed as it is by the long tradition of empiricist and rationalist philosophies of nature, is to obliterate the awareness of the truth of being as Heidegger conceives it. It is to approach things in a spirit of domination, rather than devotion. It is to demand, rather than to wait upon. It is an exercise of power, rather than contemplation. For Heidegger, technology leads us away from being toward oblivion. Therefore by advocating the view of being and truth that he does, he lays down a profound challenge to the whole modern project, more or less root and branch, which was explicitly founded on the principle that “knowledge is power”.

But there is one kind of “technology”, one way of “making”, that does not, or at least need not, fall prey to the danger of forgetting or obscuring being, and that is art. On the contrary, art has the power to reveal being with an unusual power insofar as it is attentive to being, “conferring brightness on the light itself”. This view of art seems to me to plumb deeply, a depth made all the more evident by contrasting it with the view of art which emerges most naturally from, say, an empirical, materialist worldview, in which it is extremely difficult to make any sense of art, or even of a particular work of art as a coherent unity, and of the experience of art as anything other than a peculiar neural epiphenomenon. And this suggests a paradox: namely, that a philosophical project founded on the priority of objective reality and public knowledge finally fails to deliver a world that makes sense, whereas a philosophy deeply grounded in the subjective experience of the world turns out to have further reach and richer resources.

**

Another aspect of Heidegger’s commitment to doing philosophy “in the first person,” as it were, giving subjectivity its full weight, is that he discusses matters that I associate with Kierkegaard and his existentialist offspring — matters of personal import about the interior life and relationships with others and with society. For instance, Heidegger has a good deal to say about the experience of being temporal. We are temporal creatures, living our lives in one direction, with our births and our society’s history behind us, and our future decisions and, at some point, deaths ahead of us. We have a certain amount of freedom to shape our own lives, but this freedom is hedged about by factors we cannot control. Our finding ourselves in this situation he calls “thrown-ness”: we are thrown into the world, confronted with forces and facts beyond our control. Yet we look forward, planning, preparing; this he calls “projection,” a kind of mapping out of the possibilities of our lives, including, eventually, death and the end of such possibilities. As I mentioned already, Heidegger is not greatly impressed by the old idea that the past and future do not exist, and that the present, which does exist, is but fleeting and ephemeral. For him, the past and the future are present, in experience, and both greatly enrich and influence that experience.

Yet the present retains a special status, for even if we remember or contend with the past and anticipate the future, each day we live now, today, and now is when the past and the future mingle. Heidegger identifies a temptation that arises in living out the present moment which he calls “fallen-ness”: a temptation to fall away from oneself and into society. A person who lives in this fallen state is one who lives, as it were, by proxy, taking their cues from those around them and “going with the flow”. It manifests itself in idle talk (such as one finds on weblogs like this one, for instance), curiosity, and something translated here as “ambiguity,” by which he seems to mean something like a falling away from deep understanding to surface chatter. Living in fallen-ness is the default state for most people most of the time, he says. But living in fallen-ness obscures Being; instead, one is immersed in and preoccupied with superficialities, alienated from true understanding, care, and moral responsibility — from what he calls “authenticity”.

Now, this language of “authenticity” has been so abused to justify a willfulness that is itself a flight from true understanding, care, and moral responsibility that we might justly groan when we hear it, but I do think that there is a hard kernel of wisdom here which no army of adolescents (of whatever age) can efface. There is an important difference, known to anyone who has tried it, between just going along with society, on one hand, and trying to live with integrity out of one’s commitments to truth and goodness, on the other. Where does society rub up against you?

**

Speaking of going along with society, Heidegger was a Nazi. He joined the Party in the 1930s, and remained in Germany during the war. Perhaps on analogy with Diogenes of Sinope and his bathtub (and perhaps not) some of his writings seem to try to integrate the aims of National Socialism into his philosophy. Most damningly, despite having lived until 1976, he never publicly disavowed his association with Nazism or condemned Hitler. This personal history has complicated Heidegger’s position in philosophical and cultural circles, to say the least. Was he a true Nazi or not? If he was, to what extent does this undermine or invalidate his philosophy? These are matters of controversy. The two books which have occasioned these notes take different positions: Michael Inwood argues that Heidegger’s philosophical eminence is not seriously impaired by his regrettable political life; Jeff Collins adopts a more ambiguous position.

**

These two books, by the way, which I turned to because I do not have leisure to read Being and Time itself, and also because I am afraid of it, served me quite well — insofar as I can judge of the matter. Both give overviews of Heidegger’s life, the currents of thought that influenced him, his main interests and ideas, and his influence on other philosophers. The volume by Collins is part of a series (“Introducing …”), and it reads more like a graphic novel than a regular non-fiction book: each page contains illustrations (by Howard Selina) with a paragraph or two of text. (Illustrating a book on Heidegger involves drawing quite a few pictures of a man sitting, looking thoughtful.) The book by Inwood is also part of a series (the Very Short Introductions), and it reads more or less in the usual way. Of the two, I much preferred the former. Not only was it shorter, but I found it significantly clearer, and it spent more time on topics of greater interest to me, such as Heidegger’s philosophy of being.

**

It was St Augustine who said that he wrote in order to find out what he thought, and this has been my experience while writing these notes. When I began, I was confused by these books and thought I’d write a cursory paragraph of two in vague summation. But as I wrote I began to see more clearly, enough at least to write what I have written, and I finish these notes in considerably better spirits than when I began. Naturally my understanding is still rudimentary, but I do feel that I’ve emerged from this exercise clutching more than just a handful of dust.