Experience trumps all theories
St. Nicholas has become indelibly associated with Christmas, but his actual feast day is celebrated a few weeks earlier, on Dec 6, a date that is also notable for something extraordinary that happened in the history of philosophy. The year was 1274. A Dominican monk known to history as Thomas Aquinas said Mass that morning, as priests do every morning. What happened next, as recounted in the records of the process that led to Thomas’s canonization, is nicely summarized by Josef Pieper in his book The Silence of St. Thomas:
… as Thomas turned back to his work after Holy Mass, he was strangely altered. He remained steadily silent; he did not write; he dictated nothing. He laid aside the Summa Theologica on which he had been working. Abruptly, in the middle of a sentence … he stopped writing. Reginald, his friend, asks him, troubled: “Father, how can you want to stop such a great work?” Thomas answers only, “I can write no more.” Reginald of Piperno seriously believed that his master and friend might have become mentally ill though his overwhelming burden of work. After a long while, he asks and urges once again. Thomas gives the answer: “Reginald, I can write no more. All that I have written hitherto seems to me nothing but straw.”
Later still, at the prompting of Aquinas’s younger sister, Reginald puts the question to him again. “For a long time, Thomas remains silent,” Pieper writes. “Then he repeats: ‘All that I have written seems to me nothing but straw … compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.’ ”
On the most recent feast of St. Nicholas, Mark Vernon, a former Anglican priest and the author of an excellent book called After Atheism, wrote a blog post about this called “A day to remember the silence.” Vernon rejects the notion that Aquinas was in any way repudiating his work. Instead, he suggests, Aquinas “had reached as profound an appreciation of the divine mystery as was possible. His new silence was not a rejection but the culmination of his life’s work.”
I agree. But I also think that what Aquinas discovered is that, whatever else God may be, he is not the terminus ad quem of any reasoning process. One cannot prove there is a God. If one could, there would be no need to make an act of faith.
A few years ago, Stephen D. Unwin, a theoretical physicist turned risk analyst, wrote a book called The Probability of God, in which he used Bayes’ Theorem to calculate the likelihood of there being a supreme being.
In general, the odds are only so-so. That changes if a person has had what he regards as a religious experience. This underscores that, while religious faith may not be arrived at by reason alone, it is by no means unreasonable. Experience, after all, trumps all theories. This is because it constitutes direct knowledge and, as Aquinas puts it, “knowledge is a certain effect of truth.”
Like Augustine, Aquinas also believed that while we see things because they exist, they exist because God sees them. More precisely, as Pieper explains, he believed that “the notion that things have an essence cannot be separated” from another notion: “that this essential character is the fruit of a form-giving thought that plans, devises, and creates.”
Lest you think this a hopelessly outmoded point of view, Pieper goes on to point out that Jean-Paul Sartre, in declaring that “existentialism is nothing more than an attempt to draw all the conclusions from a consistently atheistic position,” actually starts from the same “major premise” as Aquinas, namely, that “things have an essential nature only in so far as they are fashioned by thought.” Unlike Aquinas, however, Sartre believed there was no creative intelligence that could have thought up man and nature. So, for him, nothing in nature has a nature. As he bluntly puts it: “There is no such thing as human nature because there exists no God to think it creatively.”
This certainly shows how opposite conclusions can be arrived at starting from the same premise. The difference can probably be traced to different experiences or a lack of experience. Sartre perhaps never had what he took to be a religious experience (though the disgust that overwhelms Roquentin when he observes the roots of the chestnut tree in Nausea does seem a kind of negative epiphany).
In contrast to Sartre, the conclusion Aquinas arrived at was not that things have no nature, but that they are ultimately unfathomable — precisely because they are created, or, as Pieper phrases it, “their knowability cannot be wholly exhausted by any finite intellect.”
On the feast of St. Nicholas in 1274 Aquinas seems to have experienced some serious confirmation of that.
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The irony of all post-WWII criticism, including Sartre as well as deconstructionism and postmodernism, is that by focusing so solely on rejecting the scholastic obsession with predicates and essences they are inevitably bound to be essentialists themselves. Aquinas found the truth known by all poets, mystics, and scientists, that our knowledge consists of understanding the conditions that surround the creation, but never the creation itself. Writing down the actions, not the beings: verbs, not nouns and their adjectives, which all come out to straw.
(Of all the twentieth century intellectual movements, I think the abstract expressionists were best off: accept essence, but try to approach (if not put your thumb right on) a new one for a new age.)
Thank you for this terrific entry, I found it on Technorati after searching for Thomas Aquinas. I invite you check out my own recent article about Aquinas and the development of the Internet, cheekily entitled “How St. Thomas Aquinas Invented the Web 2.0”: http://www.whatdigitalrevolution.com/?p=17