###Ralph McInerny - ARISTOTLE AND AQUINAS

Catholic University of America Press
Chapter Title: ARISTOTLE AND AQUINAS

Chapter Author(s): Ralph McInerny
Book Title: Person, Being, and History

Book Editor(s): Michael Baur, Robert E. Wood
Published by: Catholic University of America Press. (2011)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt284zh3.9
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† Ralph McInerny
6. A r i s t o t l e a n d Aqu i na s
There are some men who seem venerable even in their youth, and
Ken Schmitz was one of them. When I was young and he was already
venerable, a function of wisdom, not of age, we met mainly at meetings.
He moved often on the academic checkerboard, although many will per-
haps imagine that he was in Toronto throughout his career. Not so. He
taught in California, he taught in Indiana, but when he was called to To-
ronto it must have seemed a homecoming. There was something deeply
fitting about it. Surely Ken is one of the finest flowers of the Pontifical In-
stitute of Mediaeval Studies, a worthy student of his master Etienne Gil-
son. In these last years he seems, like Bede, to wear “venerable” as a title;
of course the beard helps. In recent years, we have met in Argentina, in
Taiwan, even in Chicago, a wonderful town; to hear Ken lecture, to dine
and talk with him and with others of those strong survivors for whom
seventy years did not suffice, is one of the deep pleasures of the twilight
years. It seems to me that Schmitz has published more in his age than
in his youth. His glosses on the teaching of John Paul II—doubtless the
fruit of his long association with the Institute on Marriage and Family—
are mandatory reading. I wish I had something more fitting with which
to honor him. I am afraid my essay may seem sweepings from a deplet-
ed mental warehouse. Would that it were straw in the Thomistic sense.
Nonetheless, I offer it as my poor tribute to Ken Schmitz. Ad multos annos!
“I was that narrowest of specialists, the well-rounded man.”

Thus does Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, describe
115
116 Ralph McInerny
himself at the outset of the novel. But then, suggesting the effect the
events about to be narrated have had on him, he adds: “Life is much bet-
ter looked at from a single window after all.”
That is my text. There is much talk nowadays about a dialogue of
cultures. Nick Carraway might be taken as describing the contrast be-
tween, on the one hand, occupying a plurality of points of view, embrac-
ing diversity, one might say, and on the other, having a single unifying
point of view. But the object of each is presumably the same.
I wonder if those engaged in present dialogues of culture might not
learn a thing of two from an earlier. The dialogue I shall speak of is be-
tween the culture of the Greeks, as represented by Aristotle, and that of
the Christian, represented by St. Thomas Aquinas.
The Aristotelian Corpus

We must first consider the vagaries of the transmission of texts. Ar-
istotle lived in the fourth century B.C., Thomas in the thirteenth cen-
tury of the Christian era. It might perhaps be thought, mistakenly, that
since the thirteenth century was appreciably closer to the Golden Age
of Greek culture, when Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle brought philoso-
phy to a peak it has never since exceeded, that Aristotle, being chrono-
logically closer to the medievals, was thereby more known and familiar
to them than he is to us. Perhaps this would have been true if they had
been able to read him.
The tale of the fate of the writings of Aristotle seems almost fanci-
ful.1 In the first century B.C., Cicero, Horace, and others went to Athens,
and when later in their writings they refer to Aristotle, we find no men-
tion, certainly no analysis, of any of the treatises of Aristotle. Rather, the
Stagyrite is thought of as the author of dialogues similar to those of Pla-
to. Students of the treatises are startled to find Cicero lauding Aristot-
le’s literary style. The treatises of Aristotle seem to have dropped out of
the picture. We are told of their being hidden away, somewhat like the
Dead Sea Scrolls, to be found after centuries, during which no one knew
of their existence. Andronicus of Rhodes, in Cicero’s century, edited the
recently discovered treatises. Of course, none of this would have affect-
ed Thomas’s access to Aristotle, except for one thing: Aristotle wrote in
Greek, and knowledge of that language was a rare thing throughout the
early Middle Ages. Thomas himself did not read Greek.
1. See Enrico Berti, Struttura e significato della Metafisica di Aristotle (Rome: EDUSC,
2006).
Aristotle and Aquinas 117
In one of those surprising asymmetries of history, it was the dia-
logues of Aristotle that then dropped out of the picture, only to be re-
constructed in the manner of the writings of the pre-Socratics over the
last century and a half.
Boethius, in the fifth century of our era, knew Greek. He may have
studied in Alexandria, whither the school of Athens had fled, and there
he would have listened to Hellenistic Aristotelians—most of them neo-
Platonists—and have read the treatises. In the previous century, St. Au-
gustine had lamented the dying of the light of learning as the barbar-
ians—our forebears, perhaps—continued to sweep down on the hapless
Roman Empire. In book VIII of The City of God, Augustine gives a sketch
of Greek philosophy.2 Aristotle is notable by his absence from the ac-
count. Socrates is there, mention is made of some of the pre-Socratics,
but Plato occupies pride of place. Platonism is presented as the pagan
philosophy most akin to Christianity. It is in this account that Augustine
rejects one possible explanation of this kinship, an explanation he had
previously held: namely, that Plato had access, direct or indirect, to the
Bible. Now he realizes that this could not have been. All the more amaz-
ing, then, the affinity of Platonism with Christianity. Augustine tells us
he had little Greek. His knowledge even of Plato seems filtered through
intermediaries. Augustine’s account is largely a borrowed one—high-
level hearsay. My main point is that he seems not to have heard of the
Aristotelian treatises.
In the next century, Boethius (480–524), linguistically equipped for
the task, conceived a great project. He would translate into Latin the
whole of Plato and the whole of Aristotle, and he would add commen-
taries on them, of the kind that Ammonius had written on Aristotle. All
this was undertaken with an eye to showing the fundamental agreement
of Plato and Aristotle.3 Boethius was of an ancient Roman family; many
of the traditional imperial offices were retained by Theodoric, the Ostro-
goth king of Italy, an Arian reigning from Ravenna. Boethius and his sons
served their terms as consul. His was a busy, active life, but for all that, he
remained a student, a scholar. Even if he had lived to a biblical longev-
ity, it is difficult to see how he could have completed the task he had set
himself. In any event, it was only begun when Boethius was suspected of
2. Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin Books, 1981),
299–342.
3. See Ralph McInerny, Boethius and Aquinas (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic Univer-
sity of America Press, 1990), 1–6.
118 Ralph McInerny
treason, of plotting with the Emperor, in Constantinople, against The-
odoric. He was condemned to death. To this we owe that classic of prison
literature, The Consolation of Philosophy, in which Boethius, in verse and
prose, considers his plight over the course of five books. Why do the in-
nocent suffer; why do the wicked prosper? Under the tutelage of Dame
Philosophy, the whining Boethius of the outset of the work becomes the
resigned philosopher who accepts his fate. Boethius was a Christian; he
was also the author of theological tractates of enormous pith and profun-
dity. But there is no appeal in the Consolation to Christ, the innocent vic-
tim par excellence.4 Taking note of this, Dr. Johnson, dropping into Lat-
in, marveled that in such a plight Boethius proved himself to be magis
philosophus quam Christianus.5 I will return to this.
Because Boethius’ project was brought to so untimely an end, Aris-
totle throughout the early Middle Ages is represented in the liberal arts
curriculum by the few logical works of his that Boethius had put into
Latin. It is not until the twelfth century that the treatises begin to find
their way into Latin, beginning with the Nicomachean Ethics, to be fol-
lowed at the beginning of the thirteenth century with more and more
until, after Thomas’s death in 1274, it became complete. Thomas did not
know The Poetics of Aristotle, for example.
This belated arrival of Aristotle in Latin divides into two streams:
the Arabo-Latin and the Greco-Latin. The first stream consists of trans-
lations made from Arabic translations of the Greek, perhaps through in-
termediary translations. These Latin versions were often accompanied
into the university system with Muslim commentaries attached, some-
times literally surrounding the text of Aristotle on the page. Averroes,
Avicenna, and others were thus introduced to the West along with Aris-
totle. This is a fact fraught with significance.
The Greco-Latin stream, as the term suggests, consists of transla-
tions made directly from the Greek, in Venice, in Sicily, elsewhere. As is
well known, William of Moerbeke, contemporary with and fellow Do-
minican of Thomas, provided translations of Aristotle directly from the
Greek, whose faithfulness to the original has led some modern editors
to consult them as an alternate Greek text. He ended, fittingly, as bishop
of Corinth.
4. Ibid., 14–17.
5. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1980), 444; “Speaking of Boethius, who was the favorite writer of the middle ages, he
said it was very surprizing, that upon such a subject, and in such a situation, he should be
magis philosophus quam Christianus.”
Thomas Aquinas, as a student, first in Naples, then in Cologne, then
in Paris, and later as a master, had the benefit of the now fairly complete
Aristotelian corpus.
With these familiar matters recalled, I turn now to the dialogue be-
tween Thomas and Aristotle.
The Errors of Aristotle

There are a number of ways to consider the consequences of this in-
flux of Latin translations of the Aristotelian treatises. First, it made mince-
meat out of the liberal arts curriculum that had been developed over the
centuries since Cassiodorus Senator, a contemporary of Boethius.6
The seven liberal arts had been taken to sum up secular learning,
but where in the trivium or quadrivium was there room for treatises
on ethics, politics, physics, psychology, metaphysics? That this curricu-
lar conundrum should have happened precisely at the time universities
were being founded had a profound effect on these institutions, explain-
ing their difference from the arts schools out of which universities arose.
The problem of course, was far more than curricular. Once the
seven liberal arts had been thought an adequate summation of secular
learning and their compatibility with and complementarity to the faith
a matter of received opinion. So a second and far more important con-
sideration was this: How do the contents of these Aristotelian treatises
square with Christianity? This question did not loom all that large dur-
ing Thomas’s—and Bonaventure’s—student days in Paris. When Thom-
as and Aristotle became magistri sacrae paginae, after a delay because
of the opposition of the faculty to these mendicants, Bonaventure was
elected to be Master General of the Franciscans and never occupied a
professorial chair, whereas Thomas taught for three years in Paris before
returning to Italy. If one consults their respective commentaries on the
Sentences of Peter Lombard, one of the set tasks for an aspiring master,
he will not find much anguish over the compatibility of the philosopher
and the faith. There were problems, of course, but they did not loom
large. This is particularly striking in the case of Bonaventure, given lat-
er developments; he begins his commentary by giving the four causes of
the Sentences. It is true that the Aristotelian treatises could not be read
at Paris—that is, be the subject of public lectures, before their compat-
ibility with the faith had been established—by committee, of course.
6. See Cassiodorus, Cassiodori Senatoris Institutiones, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1937).
120 Ralph McInerny
But this ban came to be more honored in the breach than in the obser-
vance. Early on in Thomas’s writings there is criticism of Avicenna’s and
Averroes’ readings of Aristotle. It was a decade later, when Thomas was
summoned back to Paris in 1268 to occupy one of the chairs allotted to
Dominicans, that serious controversy over the matter had broken out.
The controversy was prompted by what has been called, variously, Latin
Averroism and heterodox Aristotelianism.7
Lists of the errors of Aristotle were drawn up, three of which were
of greatest moment. Aristotle taught—did he not?—that God did not
know what was going on in the created world, since that would be de-
meaning; that there is a single soul for all men; that the world is eternal.
In what sense would these be errors? Well, they conflicted with Christi-
anity, with belief in God’s providence, in the destiny of each soul to be
united with God, as well as with the clear statement of Genesis that in
the beginning God created heaven and earth. In short, they were in con-
tradictory opposition to truths of the faith.
This seemed not to bother certain feisty masters in the Faculty of
Arts, now, effectively, the Faculty of Philosophy. There is controversy
about the so-called two-truth theory attributed to the Latin Averroists,
but neither Thomas nor Bonaventure had any doubt that it was being
maintained that one need not worry that a position attributed to Aristot-
le was in conflict with the faith. One simply did philosophy and let theo-
logians worry about its relation to the faith. This was taken to mean that
something could be true in philosophy and false in theology.8
Unsurprisingly, Bonaventure became a foe of Aristotelianism, so
understood, and in sermons preached in Paris went after such philoso-
phers. Thomas’s reaction was more complicated, and it is his reaction
that provides my theme.9
7. This is the suggestion of Fernand van Steenberghen; see chapter 8 of La philosophie

au xiiie siècle (Louvain: Publications universitaires, 1966).
8. The Latin text of the De unitate intellectus, with an English translation, can be found
in Ralph McInerny, Aquinas Against the Averroists: On There Being Only One Intellect (West La-
fayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1993).
9. The question of whether or not there is a philosophy of St. Bonaventure supplied
the basis for a most interesting exchange between Etienne Gilson and van Steenberghen.
Gilson thought it impossible to extract philosophical nuggets from the theological writ-
ings of Bonaventure and string them together as his philosophy; van Steenbergen thought
this possible and desirable. Here is a case where one can agree with both sides. Surely van
Steenberghen is right in finding in the theological writings of Bonaventure passages that
are philosophical rather than theological: that is, they do not depend for their force on rev-
elation. Nor does Gilson deny this. But Gilson is right in insisting that these passages play a
The Eternity of the World

Bonaventure and Thomas would have been as one in saying that if
indeed a philosophical doctrine contradicted the faith, then it was false.
Obscurantism? Hardly. It is simply an application of the principle of non-
contradiction. Of contradictories, if one is true the other is false. P vs. –P.
Let p stand for “the world and time had a beginning,” then its contradic-
tory was false, since the faith is true. This was simply sweet reason. Of
course, such a swift settlement of the matter did not establish why the
conflicting philosophical tenet was false, so there was work to be done.
It is that work that characterizes Thomas’s approach.
Let us concentrate on the “error” concerning the eternity of the
world. Already, in his commentary on the Sentences, Bonaventure re-
garded this teaching of Aristotle as false, not simply because it contra-
dicted Genesis, but also because he thought it was an incoherent claim.
The eternity of the world, when analyzed, simply does not make sense.
And Bonaventure gave reasons why this is so. For instance, given an
eternal world, there would be an infinite number of souls, and infinity
would be continually added to. The upshot was that an eternal world is
impossible. That is, one had reason for rejecting it other than an appeal
to scripture.
Thomas’s treatment of the eternity of the world is most subtle. On
the one hand, as in his commentary on book XII of the Metaphysics, he
shows that Aristotle’s argument for the eternity of the world is probable
at best, and certainly not conclusive. He had even toyed for a time with
holding that this was how Aristotle himself advanced the claim. On the
other hand, as in his opusculum, written in 1271 during his second Pari-
sian professoriate, Thomas held that the arguments that the world could
not have been eternal are flawed.
Of course, if one meant that an eternal world did not exist in depen-
dence on the First Cause, that would be nonsense; but could God have
created an eternal world?10
If it were impossible, this would be either because it was something
theological role in the text. Of course, the fundamental problem is: into what wider whole
would the abstracted philosophical nuggets fit?
10. It must not be forgotten that it was on the assumption of an eternal world that Ar-
istotle argued that there must be a Prime Mover. The next few paragraphs of the text para-
phrase passages from the De aeternitate mundi contra murmurantes. An English translation
may be found in McInerny, Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings (London: Penguin Classics,
1998), 710–17.
122 Ralph McInerny
God could not do or because such a world is impossible in itself. If the lat-
ter, this would be based on the nature of becoming and the role of passive
potency in it, or because an eternal world is conceptually incoherent.
In the first sense, for something to come into being, it might be
thought that there must always have been something that could become
that thing. But before an angel was created there was not some prior
thing that could become an angel. Thus, to hold that there was always
something that could become the world is to be rejected. What is be-
ing adumbrated here is the distinction between creation and the becom-
ing that presupposes a passive potency that is actualized when a thing
comes to be.
It is no limitation on God’s omnipotence that he cannot cause what
makes no sense—for example, create something that does not depend
on him, or that what happened didn’t happen. Is an eternal world like
that? It is this that Bonaventure affirmed and Thomas denied. Why did
Thomas deny it? Well, an eternal world could be said to be impossible,
either because the efficient cause must precede its effect in duration, or
because nonexistence must precede existence. Thomas proceeds to show
that neither of these alone or both together establish the impossibility of
an eternal world.
The second sense may surprise. Isn’t creation precisely bringing
something into being out of nothing? Indeed it is. So how does Thomas
escape the seeming result that an eternal world is possible if nothing did
not precede? First he says that we must not be governed by our imagina-
tion, and think that nothing is some previous state of affairs, as it were,
prior in duration to the created thing. On the supposition of an eternal
world, which of course is created by God, and thus from nothing, the ex
nihilo here can be understood as what you have if God’s causality were
removed.
Let this suffice as a taste of this polemical opusculum on the eter-
nity of the world directed contra murmurantes. Doubtless among these
murmurers are those seeking to discredit Aristotle by means of the ar-
guments Thomas rejects. There is not, however, any overt mention or
defense of Aristotle in the opusculum.
It is easy to see that such subtle argumentation in favor of an unre-
alized possibility—the world was after all created in time—seemed to
some to align Thomas with those pesky masters in the Faculty of Arts.
Shortly after his death, teachings of Thomas would be among those con-
demned by his fellow masters.
An unstressed aspect of the discussion of the eternity of the world is
this: if the contradictory of a truth of faith could be definitively proved
false, would one thereby have established the truth of an article of faith?
If one of contradictories is false, the other is true. But that would seem to
be a claim to know that a mystery of the faith is true.
How to Read a Pagan Author

This discussion of one defense of an Aristotelian tenet (namely, the
defense that consists in holding that it is factually false that the world is
eternal but that an eternal world is not an incoherent notion) could be
multiplied again and again in the writings of Thomas, though the de-
fenses take other forms. Aristotle did after all hold that the world is eter-
nal, but that does not make him the village idiot. In the case of the oth-
er two “errors” mentioned above, Thomas did what Bonaventure never
did. He asked if the text supports the interpretation involved in those er-
rors. In short, he uses textual analysis to show, first, that Aristotle never
held that God is ignorant of the world and, second, that he taught that
each individual soul is immortal. Another polemical opusculum of the
period—De unitate intellectus contra averroistas—is a remarkable exegeti-
cal performance that establishes that the Averroist reading of book III of
the De anima simply won’t wash. It is ironic that the Averroist interpreta-
tion is favored to this day by many, perhaps most, Aristotelians. I recom-
mend this opusculum to them.
This defense of Aristotle by means of exegesis may be thought to
lie behind one of the great projects of Thomas’s last years. Beginning
in 1268 and continuing to 1273, the year before he died, Thomas com-
posed line-by-line commentaries on twelve treatises of Aristotle, not all
of which were completed, though the more important were. These are
sometimes dismissed, even by Thomists, as a twisting of the texts in
such a way that they do not collide with Christian doctrine. Quite apart
from the suggestion that one’s chosen master is a master of deception, I
find it difficult to believe that anyone saying this has immersed himself
in those commentaries. Bonaventure, of course, wrote no commentaries
on Aristotle.
If a Christian thinker like Thomas finds Aristotle congenial, comes
to his defense, reads him with painstaking closeness, this is not because
Aristotle taught truths specific to revelation. Rather it draws our atten-
tion to something shared and basic between believer and nonbeliev-
er alike: reason, natural reason, arguments that appeal for their cogen-
124 Ralph McInerny
cy, not to mysteries of the faith, which can only be believed, never in
this life fully comprehended, but to truths that are in the public domain,
available to believer and nonbeliever. Philosophy thus provides a kind of
lingua franca for Christian and pagan. As one can see, this presupposes
that philosophy and theology are distinct because their starting points
or principles are distinct.
Forgive me for dwelling so long on matters both familiar and ob-
vious. I recall them because they can be seen as providing some guid-
ance to dialogue between cultures. If the believer’s attitude toward pa-
gan philosophy were simply to juxtapose it to Christian doctrine, with
the suggestion that they are simply different outlooks, adding that the
pagan must cede to the Christian, that would not be much of a dialogue.
Perhaps it exemplifies Nick Carraway’s notion of the well-rounded man.
Thomas, by contrast, when doing philosophy, looks out the same
window that Aristotle did. This is not to be borne back ceaselessly into
the past. It is not the study of Aristotle without concern for where the
truth lies. Rather, it is to occupy the same window, appeal to principles
common to believer and nonbeliever, and come to see how much one
has in common with the pagan or the nonbeliever. Dialogue is no lon-
ger stopping at the surprising surface differences, but seeking truths that
can be recognized as such by believer and nonbeliever alike.
I mentioned Dr. Johnson’s expression of surprise, in Latin, that Bo-
ethius did not invoke his Christian belief in seeking consolation. This
is a vexed question. One answer to it, one that justifies calling Boethius
the first of the Scholastics, is that the work thereby exhibits the distinc-
tion between philosophy and theology.
To say that Thomas baptized Aristotle is as silly, at least as it is of-
ten understood, as to say that in the Commedia what Dante did was to
put Thomas into verse. Thomas’s defense of Aristotle, even when an Ar-
istotelian tenet is ruled out by one’s faith, makes clear how the dialogue
can continue. It also is conducive to modesty in what one thinks can be
established philosophically. Sometimes the only thing the believer can
say about something that contradicts his faith is that it is at most prob-
able, or not impossible. Most philosophical arguments establish opinion,
not knowledge in the strong sense. Grounded opinion, no doubt, more
or less firm opinion, but for all that short of apodictic truth. Aristotle
wrote that the adverb of old, perhaps wise, men is “perhaps.” I think that
is true—perhaps.

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Catholic University of America Press

Chapter Title: ARISTOTLE AND AQUINAS

Book Title: Person, Being, and History

“I was that narrowest of specialists, the well-rounded man.”

The Aristotelian Corpus

The Errors of Aristotle

7. This is the suggestion of Fernand van Steenberghen; see chapter 8 of La philosophie

The Eternity of the World

How to Read a Pagan Author

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