The Life of the Mind (51 page)

It is Man's character of individuality that explains Augustine's saying that there was "nobody" before him, namely, nobody whom one could call a "person"; this individuality manifests itself in the Will. Augustine proposes the case of identical twins, both "of a like temperament of body and soul" How can we tell them apart? The only endowment by which they are distinguished from each other is their will—"if both are tempted equally and one yields and consents to the temptation while the other remains unmoved ... what causes this but their own wills in cases ... where the temperament is identical?"
¹³³

In other words, and somehow elaborating on these speculations: Man is put into a world of change and movement as a new beginning because he knows that he has a beginning and will have an end; he even knows that his beginning is the beginning of his end—"our whole life is nothing but a race toward death."
¹³⁴
In this sense, no animal, no species being, has a beginning or an end. With man, created in God's own image, a being came into the world that, because it was a beginning running toward an end, could be endowed with the capacity of willing and nilling.

In this respect, he was the image of a Creator-God; but since he was temporal and not eternal, the capacity was entirely directed toward the future. (Wherever Augustine speaks of the three tenses, he stresses the primacy of the future—like Hegel, as we saw; the primacy of the Will among the mental faculties necessitates the primacy of the future in time speculations.) Every man, being created in the singular, is a new beginning by virtue of his birth; if Augustine had drawn the consequences of these speculations, he would have defined men, not, like the Greeks, as mortals, but as "natals," and he would have defined the freedom of the Will not as the
liberum arbitrium,
the free choice between willing and nilling, but as the freedom of which Kant speaks in the
Critique of Pure Reason.

His "faculty of spontaneously beginning a series in time," which "occurring in the world can have only a relatively first beginning" and still is "an absolutely first beginning not in time but in causality" must once again be invoked here. "If, for instance, I at this moment arise from my chair in complete freedom ... a new series, with all its natural consequences
in infinitum,
has its absolute beginning in this event."
¹³⁵
The distinction between an "absolute" and a "relative" beginning points to the same phenomenon we find in Augustine's distinction between the
principium
of the Heaven and the Earth and the
initium
of Man. And had Kant known of Augustine's philosophy of natality he might have agreed that the freedom of a
relatively
absolute spontaneity is no more embarrassing to human reason than the fact that men are
born
—newcomers again and again in a world that preceded them in time. The freedom of spontaneity is part and parcel of the human condition. Its mental organ is the Will.

More than forty years ago, Etienne Gilson, the great reviver of Christian philosophy, speaking at Aberdeen as the Gilford Lecturer, addressed himself to the magnificent revival of Greek thought in the thirteenth century; the result was a classical and, I think, lasting statement—
The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy
—on "the basic principle of all medieval speculation." He was referring to the
fides quaerens intellectum,
Anselm's "faith asking the intellect for help" and thereby making philosophy
ancilla theologiae,
the handmaid of faith. There was always the danger that the handmaid might become the "mistress," as Pope Gregory IX warned the University of Paris, anticipating Luther's fulminant attacks on this
stultitia,
this folly, by more than two hundred years. I mention Gilson's name, certainly not to invite comparisons—which would be fatal to myself—but, rather, out of a feeling of gratitude and also in order to explain why, in what follows, I shall avoid discussing matters that were dealt with long ago in such a masterly way and whose result is available—even in paperback.

Eight hundred years separate Thomas from Augustine, time enough not just to make a saint and Father of the Church out of the Bishop of Hippo but to confer on him an authority equal to that of Aristotle and almost equal to that of the Aposde Paul. In the Middle Ages such authority was of the utmost importance; nothing could be more damaging to a new doctrine than a frank avowal that it was new; never was what Gilson called "ipsedixitism" more dominant. Even when Thomas expressly disagrees with an opinion, he needs an authoritative quote to establish the doctrine against which he will then argue. To be sure, this had something to do with the absolute authority of God's word, recorded in books, the Old and the New Testament, but the point here is that almost
every
author that was known—Christian, Jewish, Moslem-was quoted as an "authority," either for the truth or for some important untruth.

In other words, when we study these medieval works we must remember that their authors lived in monasteries—without which such a thing as a "history of ideas" in the Western world would not exist—and that means that these writings came out of a world of books. But Augustine's reflections, by contrast, had been intimately connected with his experiences; it was important to him to describe them in detail, and even when he treated such speculative matters as the origin of evil (in the early dialogue
On Free Choice of the Will),
it scarcely occurred to him to quote the opinions of a host of erudite and worthy men on the subject.

The Scholastic authors use experience only to give an example supporting their argument; experience itself does not inspire the argument. What actually arises from the examples is a curious kind of casuistry, a technique of bringing general principles to bear on particular cases. The last author still to write clearly of the perplexities of his mind or soul, entirely undisturbed by bookish concerns, was Anselm of Canterbury, and that was two hundred years before Thomas. This, of course, is not to say that the Scholastic authors were unconcerned with the actual issues and merely inspired by arguments, but to say that we are now entering an "age of commentators" (Gilson), whose thoughts were always guided by some written authority, and it would be a grave error to believe that this authority was necessarily or even primarily ecclesiastical or scriptural. Yet Gilson, whose mentality was so admirably attuned to the requirements of his great subject, and who recognized that "it is due to scripture that there is a philosophy which is Christian, [as] it is due to the Greek tradition that Christianity possesses a philosophy," could seriously suggest that the reason Plato and Aristotle failed to penetrate to the ultimate truth was to be found in the unfortunate fact that they had not "the advantage of reading the first lines of Genesis ... had they done so the whole history of philosophy might have been different."
¹

Thomas' great unfinished masterwork, the
Summa Theo-logica,
was originally intended for pedagogical purposes, as a textbook for the new universities. It enumerates in a strictly systematic manner all possible questions, all possible arguments, and presumes to give final answers to each of them. No later system I know of can rival this codification of presumably established truths, the
sum
of coherent knowledge. Every philosophical system aims at offering the restless mind a kind of mental habitat, a secure home, but none has ever succeeded so well, and none, I think, was so free of contradictions. Anyone willing to make the considerable mental effort to enter that home was rewarded by the assurance that in its many mansions he would never find himself perplexed or estranged.

To read Thomas is to learn how such domiciles are built. First, the Questions are raised in the most abstract but non-speculative manner; then, the points of inquiry for each question are sorted out, followed by the Objections that can be made to every possible answer; whereupon an "On the contrary" introduces the opposite position; only when this whole ground has been laid does Thomas' own answer follow, complete with specific replies to the Objections. This schematic order never alters, and the reader patient enough to follow the sequence of question upon question, answer upon answer, taking account of each objection and each contrary position, will find himself spellbound by the immensity of an intellect that seems to know it all. In every instance, an appeal is made to some authority, and this is particularly striking when arguments that are being refuted have first been brought forward backed by an authoritative quotation.

Not that the citation of authority is the only or even the dominant way of argumentation. It is always accompanied by a kind of sheer rational demonstration, usually iron-clad. No rhetoric, no kind of persuasion is ever used; the reader is compelled as only truth can compel. The trust in compelling truth, so general in medieval philosophy, is boundless in Thomas. He distinguishes three kinds of necessity: absolute necessity, which is rational—for instance, that three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles; relative necessity, which is that of utility—for instance, food is necessary for life or a horse is necessary for a journey; and coercion imposed by an outside agent. And of these only the last is "repugnant to the will."
²
Truth compels; it does not command as the will commands, and it does not coerce. It is what Scotus later called the
dictamen rationis,
the "dictate of reason," that is, a power which prescribes in the form of speech (
dicere
) and whose force has its limits in the limitations of rational intercourse.

With unsurpassed clarity, Thomas distinguishes between two "apprehensive" faculties, intellect and reason; these have their corresponding intellectually appetitive faculties, will and
liberum arbitrium
or free choice. Intellect and reason deal with truth. Intellect, also called "universal reason," deals with mathematical or self-evident truth, first principles needing no demonstration to be assented to, whereas reason, or particular reason, is the faculty by which we draw particular conclusions from universal propositions as in syllogisms. Universal reason is by nature contemplative, while the task of particular reason is "to come from one thing to the knowledge of another, and so ... we reason about conclusions, that are known from the principles."
³
This discursive reasoning process dominates all his writings. (The Age of Enlightenment has been called the Age of Reason—which may or may not be an apt description; these centuries of the Middle Ages are certainly best called the Age of Reasoning.) The distinction would be that truth, perceived by the intellect only, is revealed to and compels the mind without any activity on the mind's part, whereas in the discursive reasoning process the mind compels itself.

The argumentative reasoning process is set in motion by die faith of a rational creature whose intellect naturally turns to its Creator for help in seeking out "such knowledge of the true being" that He is "as may lie within the power of my natural reason."
⁴
What was revealed to faith in Scripture was not subject to doubt, any more than the self-evidence of first principles was doubted by Greek philosophy. Truth is compelling. What distinguishes this power of compulsion in Thomas from the necessitation of Greek
alētheia
is not that the decisive revelation comes from without but that "to the truth promulgated from without by revelation, responded the light of reason from within. Faith,
ex auditu
[for instance, Moses listening to the divine voice], at once awoke an answering chord."
⁵

If one comes to Thomas and Duns Scotus from Augustine, the most striking change is that neither is interested in the problematic structure of the Will, seen as an isolated faculty; what is at stake for them is the relation between Will and Reason or Intellect, and the dominant question is which of these mental faculties is "nobler" and therefore entitled to primacy over the other. It may be of even greater significance, especially in view of Augustine's enormous influence on both thinkers, that, of Augustine's three mental faculties—Memory, Intellect, and Will—one has been lost, namely, Memory, the most specifically Roman one, binding men back to the past. And this loss turned out to be final; nowhere in our philosophical tradition does Memory again attain the same rank as Intellect and Will. Quite apart from the consequences of this loss for all strictly political philosophy,
⁶
it is obvious that what went out with memory—
sedes animi est in memoria
—was a sense of the thoroughly temporal character of human nature and human existence, manifest in Augustine's
homo temporalis.
"
⁷

The Intellect, which in Augustine related to whatever was present in the mind, in Thomas relates back to
first principles,
that is, to what comes logically before anything else; it is from them that the reasoning process that deals with particulars takes off.
⁸
The proper object of the Will is the end, yet this end is no more the future than the "first principle" is the past; principle and end are logical, not temporal, categories. So far as the Will is concerned, Thomas, closely following the
Nicomachean Ethics,
insists chiefly on the means-end category, and as in Aristotle, the end, though the Will's object, is given to the Will by the apprehensive faculties, that is, by the Intellect. Hence, the proper "order of action" is this: "First there is the apprehension of the end ... then counsel [deliberation] about the means; and finally desire for the means."
⁹
At each step, the apprehensive power precedes, and has primacy over, the appetitive movement

The conceptual foundation of all these distinctions is that "goodness and Being" differ only in thought; they are "the same
realiter,
" and this to the point where they can be said to be "convertible": "As much as [a man] has of Being, so much has he of goodness, while so far as something is lacking in the fullness of [his] Being, so far does this fall short of goodness and is said to be evil."
¹⁰
No being, insofar as it
is,
can be said to be evil, "but only insofar as it lacks Being." All this of course is no more than an elaboration of Augustine's position, but the position is enlarged and conceptually sharpened. From the perspective of the apprehensive faculties, Being appears under the aspect of truth; from the perspective of the Will, where the end is the good, it appears "under the aspect of desirableness, which Being does not express." Evil is not a principle, because it is sheer
absence,
and absence can be stated "in a privative and in a negative sense. Absence of good, taken negatively, is not evil ... for instance, if a man lacks the swiftness of the horse; evil is an absence where something is
deprived
of a good that belongs to it essentially—for instance, the blind man, who is deprived of sight."
¹¹
Because of its privative character, absolute or radical evil cannot exist. No evil exists in which one can detect "the total absence of good." For "
if the wholly evil could be, it would destroy itself."
¹²