Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/250

Rh 232 AQUINAS human reason. The distinction between these two was made emphatic by Aquinas, who is at pains, especially in his treatise Contra Gentiles, to make it plain that each is a distinct fountain of knowledge, but that revelation is the more important of the two. It is important to mark what Aquinas means by revelation and by reason. Revelation is a source of knowledge, rather than the manifestation in the world of a divine life, and its chief characteristic is that it presents men with mysteries, which are to be believed even when they cannot be understood. Revelation is not Scripture alone, for Scripture taken by itself does not cor respond exactly with his description; nor is it church tradition alone, for church tradition must so far rest on Scripture. Revelation is a divine source of knowledge, of which Scripture and church tradition are the channels; and he who would rightly understand theology must fami liarise himself with Scripture, the teachings of the fathers, and the decisions of councils, in such a way as to be able to make part of himself, as it were, those channels along which this divine knowledge flowed. Aquinas s conception of reason is in some way parallel with his conception of revelation. Reason is in his idea not the individual reason, but fountain of natural truth, whose chief channels are the various systems of heathen philosophy, and more especially the thoughts of Plato and the methods of Aristotle. Reason and revelation are both of them separate sources of knowledge, which have their appropriate channels ; and man can put himself in possession of each, because he can bring himself into relation to the church on the one hand, and the system of philosophy, or more strictly Aristotle, on the other. The conception will be made clearer when it is remembered that Aquinas, taught by the mysterious author of the writings of the Pseudo-Dionysius, who so marvellously influenced mediaeval writers, sometimes spoke of a natural revelation, or of reason as a source of truths in themselves mysterious, and was always accustomed to say that reason as well as revelation contained two kinds of knowledge. The first kind lay quite beyond the power of man to receive it, the second was within man s reach. In reason, as in revelation, man can only attain to the lower kind of knowledge ; there is a higher kind which we may not hope to reach. But while reason and revelation are two distinct sources of truths, coming to men by two distinct means of convey ance, the supernatural and the natural means for the delivery of truth, and apprehended by two distinct facul ties, reason and faith, the truths which each reveal are not in themselves contradictory ; for in the last resort they rest on one absolute truth they come from the one source of knowledge, God, the Absolute One. Hence arises the compatibility of philosophy and theology which was the fundamental axiom of scholasticism, and the possibility of a Summa Theologioe, which is a Summa Philosophise as well. All the many writings of Thomas are preparatory to his great work the Summa Theologice, and show us the progress of his mind training for this his life work. In the Summa Catholicos Fidei contra Gentiles he shows how a Christian theology is the sum and crown of all science. This work is in its design apologetic, and is meant to bring within the range of Christian thought all that is of value in Mahometan science. He carefully establishes the necessity of revelation as a source of knowledge, not merely because it aids us in comprehending in a somewhat better way the truths already furnished by reason, as some of the Arabian philosophers and Maimonides had acknowledged, but because it is the absolute source of our knowledge of the mysteries of the Christian faith ; and then he lays down the relations to be observed between reason and revelation, between philosophy and theology. This work, Contra Gentiles, may be taken as an elaborate exposition of the method of Aquinas. That method, however, implied a careful study and comprehension of the results which accrued to man from reason and revelation, and a thorough grasp of all that had been done by man in relation to those two sources of human knowledge; and so, in his preliminary writings, Thomas proceeds to master the two provinces. The results of revelation he found in the Holy Scriptures and in the writings of the fathers and the great theologians of the church ; and his method was to proceed backwards. He began with Peter of Lombardy (who had reduced to theological order, in his famous book on the Sentences, the various authoritative statements of the church upon doctrine) in his In Qualuor Sententiarum P. Lombardi libros. Then came his deliverances upon undecided points in theology, in his XII. Quodlibeta Disputata, and his Q^lccs tiones Disputatce. His Catena Aurea next appeared, which, under the form of a commentary on the Gospels, was really an exhaustive summary of the theological teaching of the greatest of the church fathers. This side of his preparation was finished by a close study of Scripture, the results of which are contained in his commentaries, In omnes Ejnstolas Divi Apostoli Expositio, his Super Isaiam ct Jeremiam, and his In Psalmos. Turning now to the other side, we have evidence, not only from tradition but from his writings, that he was acquainted with Plato and the mystical Pla- tonists ; but he had the sagacity to perceive that Aristotle was tJie great representative of philosophy, and that his writings contained the bsst results and method which the natural reason had as yet attained to. Accordingly Aquinas prepared himself on this side by commentaries on Aristotle s De Interpretations, on his Posterior Analytics, on the Metaphysics, the Physics, the De Anima, and on the other psychological and physical writings of the great master, each commentary having for its aim to lay hold of the material and grasp the method contained and employed in each treatise. Fortified by this exhaustive preparation, Aquinas began his Summa Theologice, which was to be for human thought what the Holy Roman Empire was for the bodies, and the Holy Catholic Church was for the souls of men. It was to be a visible empire of thought, exhaustive, all-embracing, and sovereign. The Summa Theologice was meant to be the sum of all known learning, arranged according to the best method, and subordinate to the dictates of the church; that was the intention of the book; practically it came to be the theological dicta of the church, explained according to the philosophy of Aristotle and his Arabian commentators. The Summa is divided into three great parts, which shortly may be said to treat of God, Man, and the God-Man. The first and the second parts are wholly the work of Aquinas, but of the third part only the first 90 quoestiones are his; the rest of it was finished in accordance with his designs. The first book, after a short introduction upon the nature of theology as understood by Aquinas, proceeds in 119 questions to dis cuss the nature, attributes, and relations of God ; and this is not done as in a modern work on theology, but the ques tions raised in the physics of Aristotle find a place alongside of the statements of Scripture, while all subjects in any way related to the central theme are brought into the dis course. The second part is divided into two, which are quoted as Prima Secundoe and Secunda Secundce. This second part has often been described as ethic, but this is scarcely true. The subject is man, treated as Aristotle does, according to his re Xos, and so Aquinas discusses all the ethical, psychological, and theological questions which arise ; but any theological discussion upon man must be mainly ethical, and so a great proportion of the first part, and almost the whole of the second, has to do with ethical questions. In his ethical discussion Aquinas distinguishes theological from natural virtues and vices : the theological