Is it Chilly in Here? Scholastic Logic vs. Mystery

Anthony here. I have a friend who pitches his tent over in the Ukrainian Catholic branch of our universal Church, and we like to jab at each other about the relative merits of our respective traditions. He accuses the Roman tradition of being too scholastic, by which I think he means too exacting, too nitpicky, too coldly rational. The other day we had this little text exchange starting with the discussion of whether “gluten-free” hosts are valid matter:

Me: The USCCB approved some low gluten hosts. That’s probably what these are. Not truly gluten free but low enough not to cause a reaction.

Him: OK . . . this is all very scholastic for me. #leavened

Me: #scholasticsrock #gottabeexact #nofuzzylogic

Him: #mystery

Me: #touche

Now, I’ve heard before that Aquinas, the premier scholastic philosopher, is too coldly rational. But this has always puzzled me. My experience of scholasticism is of a great and thundering beauty, a profound insight into the Truth that underlies “life, the universe, and everything” (if I may use a Douglas Adams phrase for such a profound concept).

 

Fortunately it's more meaningful than this.

But then again, my first introduction to Aquinas came simultaneously with my first introduction to neoplatonism (Plato applied to Christianity) via C.S. Lewis, who is more an Augustinian than anything else. While I don’t find neoplatonism tenable when followed out to its greatest extent (it seems to lead to a denial of God’s freedom, concluding that he had to create because he pours out his being of necessity), it has a quality of transcendence (those wonderful Platonic forms!) that is beautiful and hits on an emotional level, especially when you relate it to God.

 

"I'm pointing up for a reason, you know."

We all long for some perfection, some ideal that we just can’t get on earth. Lewis delves into this in great depth with his concept of “Joy,” or sehnsucht, that piercing longing that is more wonderful than any other having, that comes unexpectedly and leaves almost instantly, but renders you breathless with wonder and clenched with aching loss all at the same time. It is brought on by little things – Lewis listed “the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of ‘Kubla Khan,’ the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves” (The Prilgrim’s Regress, afterward to the 3d edition) – but those things do not contain what you are longing for. They are shadows, reflections, pointers to some greater Ideal. Augustine’s insight was that this longing is ultimately for God. As he wrote, “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.”

 

Restless heart.

Aquinas did not discard these beautiful insights of neoplatonism. On the contrary, his systematic explication of reality gives us logical reasons to believe that God really is our heart’s greatest longing. First he gives us insight into the nature of God, and then insight into our own nature, and we can see how these relate.

Aquinas demonstrates in his famous “Five Ways” not only that God exists, but what kind of a being he is. He is perfect being, complete in himself, relying on nothing else for his existence. For we humans, our nature does not include our existence. We could easily not exist. We receive existence from something outside of ourselves; it is added to our nature. But for God, his nature is existence. The two are one and the same. He is Being Himself.

It follows from this that he is also Goodness Himself. Goodness and being are the same thing. Evil is not a thing in itself but a lack of being, like a hole.

Not a thing.

When we say that a person is sick we are saying that their nature is impaired: they have a lack in their ability to operate as a human should. They lack the fullness of the being they are meant to have as a human. When we say that a human is evil we mean something similar: their human nature is impaired; they are not being all that they are meant to be. (This is because they are misusing free will to seek the wrong ends – I’ll get to that in a moment.) Goodness is being, so God, who simply is being rather than having being, also simply is goodness rather than having goodness.

God is also Truth Himself, because, as Aquinas says, “the truth is what is.” What is, is true, and what is not, is not true. “What is” is a definition of God, since his “is-ness,” his being, is his nature. What God is is Is. (That’s a fun sentence.) God’s “I am who Am” to Moses is an insight into his nature. So if God is Being Himself, or “Is-ness” Himself, then he must also be Truth Himself.

Definition of God.

Seeing the relationship of goodness and being and truth also helps us to understand beauty. As made famous by James Joyce, Aquinas said that beauty consists of integritas, consonatia, and claritas: integrity, proportionality, and clarity. Denis McNamara explains it succinctly in his book Catholic Church Architecture and the Spirit of the Liturgy:

In the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas, a beautiful object is understood as one that gives the viewer knowledge of the inner logic of its being. As a quality of being, beauty is therefore not separated from being itself, and is made up of three constituent elements: integritas, consonantia, and claritas. Integritas, or wholeness, means that a beautiful thing has all it needs to have in order to be what it is. Otherwise it is deficient and less beautiful than it could otherwise be. Consonantia, or proportionality, speaks not only of the physical dimensions of a thing, but also of its correspondence to an ideal, most often to the “end” to which it is put, its purpose in being at all. Claritas speaks of the radiant clarity of a thing’s inner being, the power of a thing to impress knowledge of itself on the mind of a perceiver.

 

Integritas, consonantia, claritas.

If you want to know more about Aquinas’ thought on beauty there’s a more in-depth but still short and very plain-English explanation here.

As we can see, beauty can’t be separated from being. A beautiful thing is beautiful in that it has all of the being it needs to have for its nature, in proper proportion, thereby demonstrating that nature with a radiant clarity. I think we’ve all had the experience of “drinking in” something beautiful: a sunset, rolling surf, a mountain, a tree on a hill, a symphony, your wife’s beautiful face. You stare at it in a kind of awe and you even feel that it is speaking to you somehow; it is impressing you with its being, with its “it-ness.” You get a sense of what it is, what it truly is on a deeper level than would be explained by breaking it down and examining its parts (which is why modern reductionism tends to miss so much). It is precisely that “is-ness” of the thing that you are responding to.

(This is also why Mother Teresa was beautiful, even as a short, hunched woman in her eighties. I could do a whole post -- and probably will -- on why Mother Teresa, though lacking physical beauty, nevertheless had as a whole being more beauty than any modern supermodel or pop star. Bodily beauty is a real thing, but human beings are more than bodies and can be beautiful in more than physical ways.)

If beauty is directly related to being, then God, since he is Being Himself, must therefore also be Beauty Himself.

Aquinas is just as logical (and his logic just as surprising to modern minds) when talking about human nature. Starts with the concept of perfection. Perfection is a fullness or completeness of being according to the nature a thing has. So, for instance, an oak tree that grows to its full height and has a crown of leaves all busily carrying out photosynthesis while strong roots pull up water and nutrients from the soil, is fulfilling its nature as an oak tree. It is perfecting itself according to its nature. But an acorn that does not grow into a tree, or that grows into a stunted and unhealthy oak, is not fulfilling its nature to its fullest potentiality. It is imperfect.

 

Fulfilling its oak-ness.

Animals have more to their nature than plants. They are animated and sensory beings, that is, they are capable of moving about and of using their senses to perceive and to feel. An animal is perfected when all of the abilities of its nature are fully developed and operational. So an animal that is blind, or that has a lame leg, is suffering an imperfection.

Now, just as an animal has a nature with elements beyond what a plant has, a human being has a nature with elements beyond what an animal has, namely, the intellect and the will. Humans have the ability to reason, to abstract from particulars to universals. We also have the ability to freely choose between paths of action. Our perfection involves the development or “flowering” of both of these faculties. So an education is a good thing, as it develops our rational faculty. And the proper exercise of the will in choosing the good, i.e. virtue, is also necessary for our perfection.

Since God is both Truth Himself and Goodness Himself, he is the “final cause,” or ultimate end, of both the intellect and the will. He is what they are ultimately directed towards. And if our intellect and will are directed towards God, then they are also directed towards perfect Beauty, since God is perfect Beauty. So that glimpse of beauty that leaves us breathless, that moment of aching longing for some greater reality that gives the reality we see its beauty and goodness, is pointing us towards God. It is, as Tolkien said in Letter 89, a “sudden glimpse of the truth behind the apparent Anankê [constraint] of our world, but a glimpse that is actually a ray of light through the very chinks of the universe about us.”

So yes, Aquinas is very systematic, very logical. But that logic is applied to our heart’s greatest longing. What Lewis had to say about "Joy" or sehnsucht matches what Augustine wrote about the longing for God ("our hearts are restless until they rest in thee") which in turn matches what Aquinas wrote about God being perfect Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. And it also means that truth and goodness and beauty are the same thing at the highest level. Which is why someone like Tolkien can so deeply demonstrate truth by entwining it with beauty. 

I think when my friend wrote "#mystery" he was not talking about a lack of knowledge, but that sense of a greater reality – call it Truth, Goodness, or Beauty, or simply God – that you can grasp or feel in a way that goes beyond reason. As Tolkien wrote in Letter 89,

I was riding along on a bicycle one day . . . when I had one of those sudden clarities which sometimes come in dreams. . . . I remember saying aloud with absolute conviction: 'But of course! Of course that's how things really do work'. But I could not reproduce any argument that had led to this, though the sensation was the same as having been convinced by reason (if without reasoning). And I have since thought that one of the reasons why one can't recapture the wonderful argument or secret when one wakes up is simply because there was not one: but there was (often maybe) a direct appreciation by the mind (sc. reason) but without the chain of argument we know in our time-serial life.

We might call this “apprehension via mystery,” a more direct apprehension of the reality underlying everything that exists than we normally get through a process of reason. But this apprehension is not opposed to reason; on the contrary it seems perfectly consonant with reason (which makes sense if it is an apprehension of something true, since reason’s goal is truth) though it was not arrived at through a process of reason.

For me, Aquinas’ rational explication does not diminish mystery in this sense, but offers an “apprehension via logic” that exists side-by-side with this “apprehension via mystery.” Suddenly I’m not feeling these things in a vacuum: I know what the feelings are and why I have them. I know what I long for. The longing is not any less beautiful, painful, or mysterious for the logical explanation; indeed it still transcends that explanation in a way that makes me think of Aquinas’ words after he had a mystical experience of God: “All that I have written is as straw compared to what I have seen.”

"Straw"

On his deathbed not long afterwards Aquinas asked that the Song of Songs be read to him. The greatest rational mind in history prepared himself for death with poetry.

This is my experience with the scholastic tradition. For me, it has always been mediated through imagination, visible in art, poetry, myth, and it appeals to me because of the beauty of both its flawless logic and what that logic gives insight to: my heart’s deepest longing.

No, I’ve never found Aquinas cold.