St. Thomas in Protestant Thought

The Protestant Reformation was, among other things, a reaction to the late Medieval church and a return to the Church Fathers.  The sixteenth-century Reformers were highly critical of the doctrine of faith espoused by their Catholic contemporaries, the Schoolmen (the Catholic theologians at the various universities). By and large, later generations of Protestants seem simply to have taken the criticisms of the Reformers as the final word and assumed that they would not be likely to find anything of permanent worth in the Schoolmen’s teaching on faith - including the teaching of Aquinas.  And so today Aquinas’s views on faith are practically unknown among Protestants. (Arvin Vos, Aquinas, Calvin, & Contemporary Protestant Thought, pp. 1, 2)

I would add to this that many Protestants assume that the arguments of the Reformers, John Calvin specifically, against the Schoolmen were arguments against the entire Medieval scholastic tradition. McGrath in his monograph on Calvin points out that these Schoolmen were teachers in the French Sorbonne who were not espousing a pure scholasticism.  

Vermigli on the Visio Dei

In eternal life the essence of God will be known by the blessed, not of course by the senses but by the soul or mind; as John says: “When he appears we shall see him as he is.” Paul affirms the same thing: “Now we see him through a glass darkly, but then face to face.” [...] No one doubts that God sees us absolutely and essentially. But we should not persuade ourselves by this that the blessed will know the nature and substance of God completely and in all respects, but only according to our capacity.  For the finite cannot fully receive what is infinite.  Nor is the creature able to comprehend its creator totally and perfectly …. Thus it is given only to Christ, who is God, to know the essence of God perfectly and fully.  Others will also see it, buy only according to their capacity. (The Peter Martyr Vermigli Library, Vol. 4: Philosophical Works, pp. 148, 149)

God’s Will Does Not Exclude Secondary Causes

The will of God, as it is the first and universal cause, does not exclude intermediate causes that have power to produce certain effects. Since however all intermediate causes are inferior in power to the first cause, there are many things in the divine power, knowledge and will that are not included in the order of inferior causes. Thus in the case of the raising of Lazarus, one who looked only on inferior causes might have said: “Lazarus will not rise again,” but looking at the divine first cause might have said: “Lazarus will rise again.” And God wills both: that is, that in the order of the inferior cause a thing shall happen; but that in the order of the higher cause it shall not happen; or He may will conversely. We may say, then, that God sometimes declares that a thing shall happen according as it falls under the order of inferior causes, as of nature, or merit, which yet does not happen as not being in the designs of the divine and higher cause. Thus He foretold to Ezechias: “Take order with thy house, for thou shalt die, and not live” (). Yet this did not take place, since from eternity it was otherwise disposed in the divine knowledge and will, which is unchangeable. Hence Gregory says (Moral. xvi, 5): “The sentence of God changes, but not His counsel”—that is to say, the counsel of His will. When therefore He says, “I also will repent,” His words must be understood metaphorically. For men seem to repent, when they do not fulfill what they have threatened. (Thomas Aquinas, ST. I, Q. 19, a. 7)

When the biblical authors speak of God “relenting” this obviously does not mean that God became something different than he was before. His eternal plan is not thwarted by the evil acts of men.  His eternal love for those whom he has created is mediated through temporal reality, including those events which God has foreknown to take place through the will of men. This cooperating principle is the Love of God. This “relenting” in God Thomas says should be understood metaphorically; that is, we should understand that when God seems to be affected by the persecution of his people or the evil of men he is much more than what we consider from the definition of “affect.” He is not eternally being affected from the outside - that would not be greater.  He is infinitely willing the good.  The suffering of God’s people has meaning for him so that he acts on their behalf.  In this sense “affect” is a metaphor for the fact that God really cares about his creatures.  

Congar on Essentialism in Aquinas

Any attempt to present him [Thomas] as an ‘essentialist, that is, as being conscious of and as affirming first of all the common divine essence, and only secondarily the Persons in that essence, would be to betray the balance of his theology.  Such an interpretation should no longer be possible since the appearance of the studies by A. Malet, H.F. Dondaine, E. Bailleux, M.-J. le Guillou and others.  This interpretation has all too frequently been based on the fact that Thomas’ study of the Trinity of persons in the Summa is preceded by a study of the divine essence.  Surely, however, it is hardly possible not to proceed in this way from the point of view of teaching? Is this procedure not justified in the economy of revelation itself?  Did John Damascene not begin with the unity of ‘God’?  Thomas had a very lively sense of the absolute character of God, his transcendence, his independence and his sufficiency.  In his mystery, which is both necessary and absolute, God knows and loves himself.  He communicates his goodness with sovereign freedom in the free mystery of creation and of the ‘divine missions’ through which creatures, who are made ‘in his image’, are included in that life of knowledge and love and are in this way ‘deified’. (Yves Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, pp. 116, 117)

Most of this flies in the face of Karl Rahner’s assertions in The Trinity (See pp. 16, 17) that the medieval-Latin tradition of beginning with the divine essence before discussing the Persons sets up an abstract metaphysical God who is impersonal and altogether different from the God of the Bible.

Aquinas and the God of the Bible

Roger Olson is one among many scholars who follow in line with Karl Barth’s critique of Medieval (particularly St. Thomas) concepts of natural theology and their effect on the doctrine of God.  Olson notes that Thomas’s “portrait of God seems quite foreign to the God of the scriptural narrative, who genuinely grieves and sorrows and even repents (relents) when people pray.” (The Story of Christian Theology, p. 342) Olson blames this on Thomas’s use of natural theology, that because God is One and immutable he resembles Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover more than the God of the Bible.  Joseph Owens notes that many Modern scholars hold that:

The remote detachment and aloofness of the Aristotelian prime mover remains irreconcilable with the Judeo-Christian God.  But Aquinas experienced no difficulty whatever in this regard. He approached the problem from the standpoint of the notion of being that he had found in Exodus.  God is by nature being. That is the name and nature proper to him. No one else can have that nature, for according to the Scriptures strange gods cannot be tolerated.  God alone had being as his nature.  Philosophically the unicity of subsistent existence was indicated. (”Aristotle and Aquinas” in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, p. 46)

Owens continues his opinion concerning Thomas’s doctrine of God in contradistinction to Olson’s view:

There is neither coldness nor insensitivity in this relationship of primary being to his creatures, despite the infinite abyss that separates the basic natures of creator and of creature. (Ibid., p. 47)

The Errors of Men

You have ordered it, and so it is, that every disordered mind should be its own punishment. (St. Augustine, Confessions, I.12)

Authority for Reason

“For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead.” (Rom. 1:20)

According to St. Thomas this verse gives Christians the authority to demonstrate God’s existence based on natural reason.  Although, one must remember, as Fergus Kerr points out, one must believe in order to properly use reason.  

No Epistemology Without Theology

Thomas sees no gap between mind and world, thought and things, that needs to be bridged, either by idealist/empiricist representations or (as with Barth) by divine intervention.  His view of how our minds are related to the world is interwoven with his doctrine of God:  no epistemology without theology.  But his (perhaps naive) confidence that things are indeed as they seem, that there is no veil between the world and our minds, springs from, indeed is identical with, his belief in the world’s belonging to God. (Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas, pp. 30, 31)

Dumb Generalities

Some have most likely heard, as have I, that one huge problem with the Medieval period is that they considered there to be only one type of being.  The theory goes that from Jon Scotus Eriugena to Meister Eckhart there was no adequate distinction of being as it should be distinguished between Creator and creature.  Against that:

Fergus Kerr has not been alone recently in drawing attention to the extend to which Aquinas, in his understanding of the being of God (a phrase that even here does not say that being and God are the same), draws his understanding not from … the science of being in so far as it is being of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, but from a reading of the Vulgate’s (and behind the Septuagint’s) rendering of Exodus 3:14. (Laurence Paul Hemming, “In Matters of Truth: Heidegger and Aquinas” in Fergus Kerr, Contemplating Aquinas, p. 92)

Aquinas gets his concept of being from the eimi of the Exodus story, similar to Augustine getting his rationes seminales from Ecclesiasticus.  This at least clarifies, Scotus’s concept of univocal being aside, that analogy implies a distinction within being.  And as anyone who has read even the smallest amount of Aquinas knows he strongly separates the Ipsum Esse Subsistens of the Creator from the esse commune of the creature. 

Analogy

For Aquinas for man to make any statement concerning the nature of the Triune God he ipso facto speaks analogously.  He is ontologically the Father but he is not a father as defined in human terms.  Men predicate things of God’s nature based on his/her own experience of creation; therefore man’s knowledge of God is limited to what he can know of God by analysis of the world - and Scripture of course.

This is why John Calvin said that in order for man to know God he must know himself.  We normally cannot know God as Father unless we first know the human role of father (with an implicit knowledge of sonship). Of course God the Father is not merely a duplication of man’s concept of father.  He is the archetypal Father. He is the transcendent Father who gives form and meaning to the relationships of mankind.