Back when I was but a poor little Protestant boy at a fancy Catholic prep school, I had a heated exchange with one of our theology teachers. He was asking us how we knew what constituted Reality, and I didn’t find the question very amusing. Here’s how it wrapped up, more or less:
MWD: “We know what the world is like because we see it with our eyes and hear it with our ears.”
Teacher: “Some people see things that aren’t there and hear voices in their heads.”
MWD: “They’re insane.”
Teacher: “That’s what you say.”
MWD: “If the rest of us can’t see or hear these things, they must be insane.”
Teacher: “So reality is just a democracy? A majority opinion? The sky is only blue because most of us agrees that it’s blue?”
MWD: “No, no! It just is. Things just are the way they are.”
Teacher (smiling): “You’re a Thomist.”
MWD: “What’s a Thomist?”
Teacher: “A follower of Thomas Aquinas.”
MWD: “What did Thomas Aquinas say?”
Teacher: “That things are pretty much the way they seem to be.”
I remember how excited I was to have a name for my thinking. I was a Thomist. It had a nice ring to it.
Thomism, as you know, is also called moderate realism because Thomas believed that Reality was comprehensible—at least, moderately so. Thomas’s thought is free of all later attempts to pit reason against experience (rationalism vs. empiricism) or ideas against matter (idealism vs. materialism).
If the sky appears to be blue, that’s because it is. If the grass appears to be green, that’s because it is. If water occasionally appears to become wine, that’s because it does. If wine doesn’t appear to become Blood… well, that doesn’t mean it isn’t.
Appearances can be deceiving, but usually they’re not. That’s Thomism in a nutshell.
Sadly, though, my Thomism didn’t last very long.
I got very into Albert Camus during my senior year. Now, in my defense, I wasn’t the average, moody teenaged Camuiste. I didn’t drink coffee and smoke cigarettes: I drank wine and smoked cigars. And I honestly found Camus’s writings compelling, as I later did Sartre’s. I took to calling myself a Christian absurdist, then a Christian existentialist, and finally a Christian nihilist.
Why a nihilist? Because I believed in Christianity, but I didn’t think it could be proven. In fact, I didn’t think anything could be proven. In high school and college I developed a fascination with Perennialism, also known as the Traditionalist School. Through the Perennialists, I became heavily influenced by Muslim thinkers, especially al-Ghazali.
I rejected natural law and speculative reason. I rejected the idea of an intelligible order in Creation. I rejected the very concept of “knowability” independent of Revelation.
Had I known a little bit of philosophy, I would’ve sympathized deeply with Abelard’s nominalism and Ockham’s voluntaryism. Had I known a little bit of theology, I would have been drawn to the presuppositionalism of Cornelius van Til.
In retrospect, I’m grateful not to have heard of those men before I passed out of my “nihilist” phase. But, after all, that’s what it was: nihilism.
Nihilists deny that the universe has any meaning. So did I. What is meaning, anyway? It’s a sense of purpose. It’s a reason for something. Take these three examples:
(A) A police officer is shot in the line of duty while saving a little girl from kidnappers. His death has meaning. We praise his courage, valor, and sacrifice.
(B) A drunk driver jumps the curb and hits a pedestrian. We say the pedestrian’s death is meaningless. It served no purpose. He wasn’t a hero or a villain.
(C) A man deserts from the army. He’s captured, tried, and executed. His death is more ignominious than the pedestrian’s, and yet that ignomity lends it a greater sense of purpose. Justice itself gives his death a different sort of meaning.
Of course, a nihilist must disagree. He denies that abstractions like courage and justice have any meaning, and so every death is a meaningless death. The police officer is no more praiseworthy than the pedestrian. We have no reason to condemn the deserter—or the drunk driver.
And if nominalists deny that there’s any intrinsic value to self-sacrifice, then the officer’s death isn’t good beautiful or sacred. It’s good because God says it’s good, but He could just as easily say that drunk driving is good. Self-sacrifice is correct, but that’s all. To lay down your life for your friends is “right” for the same reason it’s “right” to lay down your fork to the left of your plate: because Simon says.
If course, I’m not a philosopher. The nihilists and nominalists might be right after all. But they don’t seem to be right.
That’s the only argument I can really muster. When I read that St. Maximilian Kolbe offered to die a gruesome death in the place of a husband and father in Auschwitz, I believe that what he did was right—not by divine fiat, but by something inherent in the act itself. It’s beautiful, the way my wife is beautiful. It’s apparent; it’s self-evident. It can’t be described and doesn’t need to be.
If anything is true, it’s true that Maximilian Kolbe’s death had meaning. If up is up and down is down, then he’s a saint.
And it’s the same way with God. Muslims say that it’s insulting to Allah to attribute static definitions to his properties. He’s all-merciful, but what is mercy? Whatever Allah says is mercy. He’s all-loving, but what is love? Whatever Allah says is love.
But that doesn’t seem quite right, does it? When you read the Scriptures, or just think about the way the Universe is laid out, you don’t feel so guilty trying to “pin God down.” On the contrary: you feel like He’s trying very hard to reveal Himself to you, to tell you about Himself, and you want to take him at His word.
Consider this hypothetical. Say you’re reading in the park one day when you’re suddenly beamed up into a flying saucer. The saucer’s pilot is a Martian anthropologist. He wants to know about all of Earth’s religions and philosophies, and he asks you to explain Christianity.
“I’m not interested in the mythology,” he explains. “I don’t care how many gods you worship, or whether they look like men or elephants or feathered dragons. Just give me your worldview in a nutshell. The Buddhists say they believe in detachment from worldly desires. Hindus believe in cosmic harmony. Muslims believe in submission to God’s will. What do Christians believe?”
There’s only one answer that Christians can give. We believe that love is the supreme force in the universe.
Yes: as the Scriptures explain, we believe in love. God Himself is love (1 John 4:16). The path to salvation is opened because God loves us (John 3:16). We accept the free gift of salvation by loving God and our fellow man, which is the whole of the law (Matthew 22:34-40), and everything we do must be done in a spirit of love (1 Corinthians 16:14).
Once you see that, it almost takes the mystery out of existence. Why did God make us? Well, because He’s a father. As many of you know firsthand, a father loves his daughter before she’s even born. From the moment a man holds her in his arms, he realizes that he he’d always loved this child. That’s why parents have children in the first place. The love is already there, searching for an object.
Why did God make us? The answer is written on every human heart, because we’re all sons and daughters of some mortal father. God made us because He’s our Father, and we’re His children. He loved us before He created us—before He created night and day and sky and sea and plants and animals.
Why is there something and not nothing? Because of love. As St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, “Paternity itself is the divine essence.”
That’s what we as Christians believe. And even if we’re wrong, our Martian anthropologist would acknowledge—in his purely detached, academic way—that this “love-ism” is the unique teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. It was barely even hinted at by the old philosophers. Ancient sages like Confucius and the Buddha never suspected it. Yet, once you see it, though, it can’t be unseen.
God is love, and He teaches us about Himself by giving us loving hearts. This is something we can know, something we can’t deny. It’s realer than the blue sky and the green grass. It’s realer than the upness of up and the downness of down. The Precious Blood is realer than the water and wine.
That’s why Aquinas says, “Nature is a preamble to grace.” It’s also why why anyone who tries to pit Dominicans against Franciscans is doing the devil’s work. Only a true realist like St. Francis of Assisi could have sang, “Praised be you, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death.”
But it’s also why Thomas says, “It is illicit to scrutinize the highest mysteries in such a way that one has the intention of comprehending them,” for “in divine things we can know only that they are, not what they are.” It’s why he says, “the mode of divine knowability infinitely exceeds the mode of created intellect.”
It’s the moderate nature of Aquinas’s “moderate realism” that makes it realistic. Mystery is as real as Truth. Understanding is real, but so is wonder. We couldn’t really expect to have one without the other.
Reason is useless unless we know its limits. By the same token, there’s no such thing as bafflement without knowledge, or at least the possibility of knowing. To the nominalist, we’re not men but newborn kittens, blind and helpless, mewing in the void.
I will say, this is why I don’t have much sympathy for what goes by the name of “Thomism” today. It’s sort of an arrogant rationalism, which is everywhere in the Catholic blogosphere.
This Thomism acts as though Chrisianity can be understood in its entirety by reading the Summa, and anyone who neglects to do so is worthy only of our scorn and contempt. At the same time, one senses that their aim has less to do with advancing the Faith than defending a generally traditionalist worldview.
Of course, I’m a traditionalist myself. I certainly believe the Christian worldview is rational. But I also agree wholeheartedly with St. Ambrose of Milan’s cry, “Away with arguments where faith is sought!” And with St. John Henry Newman, who said, “It is as absurd to argue men, as to torture them, into believing.”
God is love, and He is revealed through love. For some bookish souls more than others, His love is manifested in words and ideas. But those are rare, and I’m certainly not one of them.
St. Thomas Aquinas himself understood that. And he was never more Thomistic than when he reckoned with his own writings and found it wanting. You know the story, don’t you?
On the feast of St. Nicholas [in 1273, Aquinas] was celebrating Mass when he received a revelation that so affected him that he wrote and dictated no more, leaving his great work the Summa Theologiae unfinished. To Brother Reginald’s (his secretary and friend) expostulations he replied, “The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.” When later asked by Reginald to return to writing, Aquinas said, “I can write no more. I have seen things that make my writings like straw.”
Of course, St. Thomas wasn’t recating his writings. He wasn’t disowning the Summa. On the contrary. He was saying that Reality is better than realism—as any good realist should! Besides, it only seems right that the Summa Theologiae—his “Summary of the Study of God”—should remain unfinished. No mortal will ever know all there is to know about the Divine.
This final anecdote from St. Thomas’s life makes clear that his philosophy points beyond itself, beyond mere reason, towards the mysteries hidden by the veil of sin. Once God truly revealed Himself in the spirit, there was no going back.
St. Thomas Aquinas used his reason to strive for the higher mysteries and then, when he found the greatest Mystery of all, surrendered himself to it. Once the sailor reaches his destination he has no more use for maps, and once Thomas knew Love itself there was no need to keep writing.
By laying down his pen, he proved that he was something more than a philosopher or a theologian. He was more than a “moderate realist.” Thomas was much more than a Thomist. He was a Christian.