I have been reading - re-reading, actually - Josef Pieper's The Silence of St. Thomas.
According to Pieper, St. Thomas Aquinas would have agreed to a large extent with the presumption common among modern philosophers from Bacon to Kant, "that truth can be predicated not of what really exists but, in the strict and proper sense, only of what is thought." Aquinas would have simply pointed out that "real things are thought." In fact, he would add, "they are real precisely because they are thought."
Of course, what Aquinas meant was that they are real because they are thought by God. Pieper points out that this thesis won a good measure of support from of all people Jean-Paul Sartre: Both Aquinas and Sartre, Pieper observes, "start with the same 'major premise,' namely ... things have an essential nature only in so far as they are fashioned by thought." Only, for Sartre, "because there exists no creative intelligence which could have designed man and all natural things - and could have put an inner significance into them - therefore there is no "nature" in things that are not manufactured and artificial." Sartre himself puts it this way: "There is no such thing as human nature because there exists no God to think it creatively."
Discussions of God as creator usually have to do with an event several billion years ago that got the world going. But that actually misses the point. As Aquinas understands it, God as creator is creating now. There is being because God is creatively thinking it. This would include one's own being.
Before assenting to or dissenting from a proposition, it is not simply useful, but actually necessary to make sure you understand what that proposition entails. So I have found it interesting to imagine that my being here, doing what I am doing, feeling and thinking as I am, takes place because God is imagining me. That is the thought experiment referred to in the title of this post.
The title of Pieper's book, by the way, refers to Aquinas's self-imposed silence toward the end of his life. The Summa Theologica is not finished because Aquinas chose not to continue writing it: "All that I have written seems to me nothing but straw ... compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me."
Of course, what Aquinas meant was that they are real because they are thought by God. Pieper points out that this thesis won a good measure of support from of all people Jean-Paul Sartre: Both Aquinas and Sartre, Pieper observes, "start with the same 'major premise,' namely ... things have an essential nature only in so far as they are fashioned by thought." Only, for Sartre, "because there exists no creative intelligence which could have designed man and all natural things - and could have put an inner significance into them - therefore there is no "nature" in things that are not manufactured and artificial." Sartre himself puts it this way: "There is no such thing as human nature because there exists no God to think it creatively."
Discussions of God as creator usually have to do with an event several billion years ago that got the world going. But that actually misses the point. As Aquinas understands it, God as creator is creating now. There is being because God is creatively thinking it. This would include one's own being.
Before assenting to or dissenting from a proposition, it is not simply useful, but actually necessary to make sure you understand what that proposition entails. So I have found it interesting to imagine that my being here, doing what I am doing, feeling and thinking as I am, takes place because God is imagining me. That is the thought experiment referred to in the title of this post.
The title of Pieper's book, by the way, refers to Aquinas's self-imposed silence toward the end of his life. The Summa Theologica is not finished because Aquinas chose not to continue writing it: "All that I have written seems to me nothing but straw ... compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me."
Good post.
ReplyDeletei have at times energetically attacked the foundations - with what might seem an unfeeling rigour - but it was only because i felt these were not the true foundations, that there is indeed a creator, and a hidden order. If you have some sense of that primal underwriting you can be as bold as you please in analysing and unknotting the knots of thought, because you don't fear there is an abyss beneath it all - faith, if you like.