VAUGHAN'g LIFE OF THOMAS AQUINAS.*
THROUGTIOUT the history of the Catholic Church, for as long at least as it controlled the-spiritual life of Christendom, there was a remarkable identity in the intellectual type produced and fostered by Catholicism. Overriding distinctions of nationality and race, and even, not consciously, but as a result of its discipline, in a great measure suppressing individuality, the Church gave birth to a long line of thinkers who were uniquely adapted for its purposes, and who because of their adaptation were uniquely alike in their mental qualities and limitations and in the degree of their origin- ality. Two aspects of the Church disclose the conservative and progressive forces which produced this result. On the one hand, as the conservator of a large body of dogmatic tradition, it assigns the limits and lays down the lines of speculation, and precludes the possibility of those fresh starts by original minds which are notes of the modern philosophy. On the other, as the infallible depositary of truth, and recognizing no finality outside its own still developing traditions, it loaves precisely that amount of free- dom which is favourable to the minor originalities of speculation. Of the limitations of the Catholic philosophy at its best, and of its greatness and breadth within those limits, Thomas Aquinas, the colossus of Scholasticism, was perhaps a more adequate repre- sentative than was possible before his time or after it. A life of Aquinas must be at once prospective and retrospective to an extent rare in biography. His posthumous influence it would be hard to measure. Albert, under his thirty folios, sleeps the sleep of the encyclopaedist. Abelard, brilliant dialectician as he NM, but gave the name to a section of opinion in a controversy which has now only logical significance. Scot, greatest meta- physician of the schools, is only a Scotist. But Thomas, nothing so little as a Thomist, survived and out-soared his school, shaped the dogmas of the Church, educated her thinkers, inspired her saints, and is a power to-day. Merely to expound the multitude of ideas on which Aquinas left his mark would go but a little way to explain his influence ; accordingly, F. Vaughan's book is 4' The Life and Labours of S. Thomas of Aquin. By the Very Rev. Roger Bede Vaughan, 0.S.B. Vol. I. London: Longruaue and Co.
much more historical than exegetical. With wide and various erudition, that is clothed in a style of facile eloquence, he retraces the course of history and opinion for the two cen- turies that precede and include the classic age of Scholasti- cism. That epoch was crowded with events, and witnessed the small beginnings of many modern things. It gave birth to a philosophy that furnished the dialect in which we still think. It saw the rise of the monastic orders, which on their active side are the parents of our socialism and philanthropies, and on the side of contemplation introduced that current of deeper spiritual life which is characteristic of our own time. During those two centuries the chord of revolt which rings through modern literature was struck in the sphere of reason by Abelard, in religion by the Albigenses, and on the side of culture against asceticism by William of S. Amour. Perhaps during them, too, germinated those ideas in the political sphere which gave rise to the civil struggles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, whose origin is still obscure. Nor must we omit to mention the influx, through the Crusades, of Oriental modes of thought ; the influence of which on the school- men has been probably exaggerated, but which are more probably responsible for the mysticism of a later age. Over the whole period F. Vaughan passes with a light and graceful touch, which leaves no part of it unadorned. Occasionally, however, he forgets his function as a historian in his fervour as a partisan. if we prefer his history to his philosophy, it is not that his history is always impartial. It is not unnatural that Father Vaughan should side with authority when authority is called in question, but he need not have disfigured the poor Albigenses past recognition, or dipped his brush in such blazing colours when delineating what comes out on his canvas as the Mohammedan paradise of Frederick II. at Naples. if M. Guizot was not quite right is describing Abelard as the representative of free-thought, his error lay in the form of expression, and we recognize in the tradition of freedom founded, not indeed consciously, but in point of fact, by Abelard, a force not less necessary for order merely than the force of acquiescence represented by Bernard. So with William of Amour, who was the exponent of good sense and moderation against the extravagances of monasticism, but whose procedure Vaughan explains on the principles that actuate a political hack. If this narrowness of appreciation indicates a defect of temper or an unhistorical point of view, what shall we say of the metaphysical discrimination implied in the following account of the issue between Nominalism and Realism ?—
,4 If goodness, beauty, and truth are absolutely nothing but words, if the only reality is in the concrete individual, then objects, which have been hold in the greatest reverence by mankind, are phantasms or mockeries, such as Church, State, country, and even humanity itself. Kill ideas, blast theories, explode the archetypes of things, and the age of brute force is not far distant. The whole history of Christianity, of its victories, of the heroic sacrifice of its children in its defence, of their intense belief in its reality, of their marvellous lovo for its severest laws, is the worship of an universal, of an idea,.--an idea which has possessed such a reality as to have subjected the world under its con- trol, and to have lifted up the noblest to its imitation."
We are far from denying that the tendency of Nominalistic phi- losophy is towards a distrust and scepticism of universal truths, just as the tendency of Realistic is towards an exaggeration of the weight of such truths. But F. Vaughan takes no account of the vast difference between a tendency and the actual effect on indi- vidual minds swayed by a thousand other influences. For instance, it is obvious to remark that in point of fact the Nominalism of Roscelin (a propos of whom Mr. Vaughan is orating) was perfectly innocuous as regards " Church, State, country, and.even humanity itself." He applied his destructive theory to the doctrine of the Trinity, and denied the existence of a general substance of which the Three Persons of the Trinity are modifications. But it did not appear that there was any solidarity between that idea and the order of ideas F. Vaughan is alarmed about. Secondly, there is no neces- sary connection between Nominalism and an atomistic philosophy or a philosophy of mere sensation ; there is no inconsistency be- tween Berkeley's nominalism and his idealism. Thirdly, the most thorough-going Nominalists have not, in point of fact, been men whose eyes were open only to the " concrete individual," and were oblivious of its ideal aspects. The idealization of the State in the Leviathan perfectly satisfies F. Vaughan's canons, but it is the ideal- ization of the purest of Nominalists. And lastly, even if we admit the justness of F. Vaughan's lofty apology for Catholic heroism, we might ask,—without any reference to the question whether we differ from or agree with him,—who has been more distinguished by devo- tion to ideas, by the enthusiasm of humanity, than the representa- tive Nominalist of our own day? All this would have been hardly worth saying, did it not lead us to remark that it implies a grave
misconception to identify the controversy between Nominalism and Realism which raged among the achoolmen, with the languid debate on the same subject between hardly differing philosophies which now forma the psychological preface to treatises on logic. It leads to two errors, both of which we have said F. Vaughan has committed. It leads to the undue narrowing of the issue that was fought out in the Schools, and it involves the ascription of consequences to the modern form of the controversy which were applicable only to its mediaeval form, if to it. The mediaeval dis- cussion of this question in the great ago was intertwisted with the Aristotelian metaphysics of matter and form, of the active and passive intellect, of sensible and intelligible species, and was consequently of a far profounder nature, wider in its bearings, and more complex, than was possible with the crude and simple metaphysics of the ninth and tenth centuries. The Realism of Erigena, the Nominalism of Roscelin, measured in their time the breadth of the stream of speculation ; but as it flowed on it was joined by the current of Arabian philosophy, was absorbed by the great river of Aristotelianism, and what had been at the source Nominalism and Realism was at the mouth a question of matter and form,—whether matter individualized form or form matter, and how real existence was constituted by the union of the two.
The conclusion to which this parenthetical discussion has led us is not itself of parenthetical interest. The popular notion that the entire philosophy of Scholasticism is summed up, exhausted, and explained by the key-words "Nominalism" and " Realism," or that they furnish a sound principle of division by which to distinguish successive epochs and opposing schools, would be a serious obstacle to the comprehension of what Aquinas really accomplished. It was of the essence of his plan to show that the doctrines of the Church were the counterpart in the theological order of the beliefs of the natural reason, the obverse and reverse sides of the same truths. He therefore had to deal with the accepted philosophy as a whole, and not with the most conspicuous strand of it formed by the Realistic controversy. In a recent letter Mr. Gladstone has suggested a comparison between Homer's relation to Greek mythology and the work of Aquinas in theology. The transition ; from the early nature-worship of the Greeks to their later Mytho- logy was not, he believes, a natural sequence, but was effected by the importation of anew principle ; that principle was the prin- ciple of personification ; it was the offspring of Biblical traditions, and the operator was Homer. Homer sat in his mighty workshop with on one side the gorgeous mythes of dawn, of storm, of sunset, and on the other the Semitic traditions ; by a process of selection, determined by his own and the nation's genius, he trans- fers attributes from the Semitic deity and the persons of the kindred legends, and makes personal the impersonal natural agents of the inythes,—he creates a theology. So, "in a certain sense," says Mr. Gladstone, " rhornas Aquinas made a theology." However fanciful this new form of the Premier's IIomeric theory may appear, the suggested aualogy with Aquinas seems to us profound and significant. A series of theological but unreasoned beliefs and a system of reasoned but pagan theories existed side by side. To make the unreasoned theology rational, to show that the philosophy was the necessary framework of a divine order of things, was the clear function of the first organizing genius that should come into the chaos of opinion which was the result of four centuries of controversy. It was whht the great Schoolinan attempted, and, the perfectness of his instrument—the truth of the Aristotelian philosophy—being granted, he may be said to have succeeded. Like Homer, he had to reconcile two alien things, and like Homer he reconciled by identifying them. Philosophy, on the one hand, was made theo- logical, and thus a place was vindicated for what was regarded as an interloper, or at least looked upon with suspicion. The doc- trines of the Church, on the other, which had been the subject of a revelation, were shown to make no appeal to faith, as faith was then conceived, but were demonstrated to be either necessities of reason or reconcilable with it. Ho was thus the founder of Specu- lative Theology, and what he thus did has been done only once again in the history of speculation. As Hegel applies his triplets, being, non-being, and becoming—the thing, its contradictory, and the transition between them—so does Aquinas his couplet, matter and form, his formal, final, efficient, and material causes, which ho had learnt from Aristotle. If we suspect that those objects of faith which are to us so concrete must have lost their reality when stretched on so abstract a framework, we should not forget that the piety of the men who lived habitually among those abstractions was perhaps even more obtrusive than their philosophy. If we are startled to find God denominated actus purus or the primum niovens, the Hegelian who is also a Christian would accept the terms. If we are apt to believe that the thinkers who interpreted to themselves the providential governance of the world in terms of formal and efficient causes must have had the springs of action. arrested in them, we in England at least may remember the ser- vices rendered to learning and to the cause of the poor by the Franciscan friars, who undoubtedly produced the greatest dialecticians of the Schools. In all this, however, we have gone beyond our record, though we have fallen within our scope. F. Vaughan has in this volume restricted himself to the bio- graphy and philosophical antecedents of Thomas, and reserves for his second volume the discussion of the monumental treatise with which the name of Aquinas is chiefly associated. As Aquinas was the greatest figure, so is the &mina Theologim the greatest book of Scholasticism. Ho was, iudeed, unacquainted with the physics even of that ago, but all other things theu known to men seem to find their ordered place within its vast boundaries. It is, of course, a theology ; but it is also a metaphy- sic, a psychology, an ethic, and a philosophy of politics. It is even of its sort a poetry—the poetry which belongs to all high metaphysics ; and it has a kind of epic completeness which justifies Professor Brewer in calling it the ground-plot of the Divine Comedy.
With the most original part of F. Vaughan's book we hare not space to deal as it deserves. As the result, we imagine, of a reaction against the exaggerated place assigned to the Thotnist philosophy during the last half-century, F. Vaughan asserts the place and power of Thomas'i sainthood. To this even more than to the philosophy, or to it in some kind of conjunction with the philosophy, he attributes the lasting influence of Aquinas, even in a great degree, his intellectual eminence, and what is more probable, his orthodoxy. With the last, at least, we are not dis- posed to disagree, but when the author goes on to recommend monastic " detachment " as a remedy for the lamentable pre- valence of heresy and as a breakwater against the "advancing wave of democracy," ho appears to suggest a cure which is certain not to be tried except by those who are in no danger of the disease.
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