A Mouse in Wolf's Clothing (part II)

Skipping ahead to the 13th century we find Thomas Aquinas weaving the divergent threads of Aristotle’s logic and the revealed religion of the prophets into a unified fabric. Unfortunately, in the centuries between Aristotle and Aquinas, a remarkable thing had happened. The followers of three of the great western religions had become “people of the book.” God’s word had been written down. It was one thing for God to reveal Himself to prophets, priests, and shamans, quite another to have His revelations recorded in a book for all to see. Prior to the book, God’s prophets, doing what advisers to presidents, kings, and prime ministers do, could render practical prophesies, appropriate to their time and place. They were under no compulsion to be consistent. But the written and authoritative words of God compelled the prophets, not only to give good advice, but to maintain uniformity with past prophesies. If for example, it were written that God had told an ancient prophet that a certain piece of real estate was to belong to a particular tribe forever, that fact had to be taken into account.

The written word of God had another awkward effect. It documented some of the myths the ancient people had used to explain things to themselves. As human beings gradually learned more about the causes of things, it became apparent that the myths sometimes contained false or conflicting details. But because the books were taken as the word of God (or Allah), the myths were difficult to disbelieve. Until the 16th century we believed the earth stood at the center of the universe. More outrageously, we believed until a much later date (early 19th century) that the universe was created in 4004 BC. Many of us still believe that the universe and everything in it was created from nothing in six days.

So when Aquinas sat down to mend the rift between reason and revelation, he was forced to regard every declarative statement in the book as a self-evident truth. Every one of God’s pronouncements presented him with another unalterable fact. In several ways, that made his job easier. For one, the book provided a reasonably accurate historical structure upon which the acts of God and man could be arrayed. Aquinas could also simply disregard as errors anything Aristotle or anyone else had said that contradicted the book. But the book’s drawbacks far exceeded its benefits. The myths had to be made to fit with physical and historical reality. Will Durant wrote, for example, that Aquinas more or less agreed with Aristotle and Averroës (a Moslem philosopher) that the world is infinite, and that “the arguments offered by the theologians for creation in [historical] time are weak, and should be rejected ‘lest the Catholic faith should seem to be founded on empty reasonings.’” Durant goes on to say that Thomas nevertheless concluded that we must believe on faith the creation story as related in the book. Thus, for Aquinas, the precedent in the book had to be followed regardless of what reason may have told him. Aquinas also describes in great detail a hierarchy of angels and archangels, assigning duties to each level of angel, establishing their existence as a matter of logical fact.

Despite his proclivity toward credulity, no one should dismiss Aquinas altogether. Even though cynics like James Joyce might refer to Thomas’s work as “scholastic stink,” Aquinas was a genius who understood his first principles and, using Aristotle’s logic, deduced from them a complete and coherent religion that contradicted nothing in the book of God’s word. He even managed to demonstrate how some of the traditional (non-scriptural) practices of his church fit into the saga of God and man. By Aquinas’s inspired reasoning Aristotle and the prophets were made to speak with one voice. But Aquinas had overlooked an important reality – the human desire to know knows no boundaries.

[To be continued.]