progress

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Aquinas was a genuinely progressive thinker. In fact, he was the “progressive” theologian of the 13th century. Thomas was open to everything that was good and useful for helping to explicate the faith. He exhibited great reverence not only for St. Augustine, but also for “the Philosopher” (Aristotle), as well as for Dionysius, Hilary, Ambrose, Peter Lombard, Maimonides, Avicenna and Averroes, Damascene, Gregory of Nyssa, and so many more. Although he was raised on Augustine, he clearly did not limit himself to Augustine. The irony, however, is that a number of Thomists during my early years in philosophy would limit their sources to St. Thomas Aquinas. In fact, in my 2nd year when we were taught modern philosophy for the first time, the professor would teach us some basic ideas of this or that thinker and then proceed to tell us what was wrong with them and why Aquinas had it right. This, of course, was a terrible way to teach–it was grounded in a flawed starting point. The result he was trying to achieve was for us to limit our thinking, our sources, to St. Thomas, which is a very “anti-Aquinas” way of operating. 

We have much more data at our disposal today than Aquinas had in the 13th century, very important data on human nature thanks to the development of the science of psychology and its various schools of thought, as well as psychiatry, neuroscience, anthropology and sociology, physics, history and various approaches to hermeneutics, etc., not to mention the different kinds of logic that developed in the 20th century, such as mathematical, modal, epistemic, temporal and many valued logics. There is no doubt that Aquinas would have taken a deep dive into all of this and more. 

There is a serious temptation in some people to want to keep things very simple and manageable, i.e., the bible alone, the koran alone, or the Catechism alone, or Aquinas alone. I believe that is why many young university students are drawn to ideological thinking, for it makes life much simpler. They can look at this utterly complex world through the lens of an ideology and everything begins to make sense. Karl Popper addressed this problem and showed how this kind of thinking is problematic–everywhere one looks one can find confirmation for an overarching idea.[1]  Ultimately, this is just lazy mindedness and an inordinate need for security. In short, closed mindedness. We see this pattern of thinking in fundamentalism of all stripes, that is, in Islam, Evangelical Protestantism, Catholicism, left and right wing political ideology, etc. It makes for a very simple existence, but an impoverished one. 

When we study Aquinas for years on end, we do see that out of great reverence he very often bends over backwards to defend the particular authority he leans on, such as the Philosopher (Aristotle) or whoever he cites in his Sed contra. He’s very respectful of these authorities, but not all of his arguments are of the same strength and weight–some just hang from a thread. He has been severely criticized for his arguments for the death penalty–dangerously akin to totalitarian thinking–, and Grisez took issue with what he wrote on desire after the Beatific vision, and in the end it is hard to disagree with Grisez on this. The point I make is that one can indeed argue with Aquinas, and great theologians have been doing so for the past 700 years, but especially in the 20th century. He was a genius of the highest order and a Doctor of the Church and deserves great reverence and consideration, but the notion that he cannot be contradicted and is immune from further development is not quite right. The wonderful thing about Catholic theology and Catholic teaching is that, despite what many traditionalists seem to believe, it continues to develop on the basis of questions that have never been asked. Questions are the driving force behind any science, and Aquinas asked a ridiculously large number of questions, which is why he made so much progress (progressive). But all possible questions have not been exhausted and never will be.

Notes

1. In his Science: Conjectures and Refutations , Popper writes: “These theories appeared to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. The study of any of them seemed to have the effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, opening your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirming instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refused to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still “un – analysed” and crying aloud for treatment.

The most characteristic element in this situation seemed to me the incessant stream of confirmations, of observations which “verified” the theories in question; and this point was constantly emphasized by their adherents. A Marxist could not open a newspaper without finding on every page confirming evidence for his interpretation of history; not only in the news, but also in its presentation which revealed the class bias of the paper – – and especially of course in what the paper did not say. The Freudian analysts emphasized that their theories were constantly verified by their “clinical observations”. As for Adler, I was much impressed by a personal experience. Once, in 1919, I reported to him a case which to me did not seem particularly Adlerian, but which he found no difficulty in analyzing in terms of his theory of inferiority feelings, although he had not even seen the child.

Slightly shocked, I asked him how he could be so sure. “Because of my thousand-fold experience,” he replied; whereupon I could not help saying: “And with this new case, I suppose, your experience has become thousand-and-one-fold.” What I had in mind was that his previous observations may not have been much sounder than this new one; that each in its turn had been interpreted in the light of ‘previous experience’, and at the same time counted as additional confirmation. What, I asked myself, did it confirm? No more than that a case could be interpreted in the light of the theory.”