Chesterton's Aquinas

I just finished Chesterton's biography of Thomas Aquinas. I did so because Chesterton's style is always entertaining, and because I have a desire to go places I've been warned not to go, like a 70 year old out of shape man who decides to wrestle alligators, just for the bragging rights. Aquinas can be appreciated and contextualized by a Protestant. But Chesterton himself is a different story. He doesn't mask his contempt for Protestantism in this work. "Alligator" is not a bad analogy.

Chesterton defends Aquinas as the father of Common Sense philosophy and theology, beginning as Aristotle did with "real things" as opposed to the abstract forms of Plato. Aquinas observed the changeableness of things, and the potentiality of things, but instead of lapsing into existentialism or nihilism like many 20th Century philosophers, chose to reason "up" instead of "down." Changeableness meant all things were moving towards the Unchangeable, and had their origins in it (Him). Potentiality meant Purpose. Purpose meant Personality. Changeableness, however, did not mean that any idea or object is fleeting or to be belittled. On the contrary, every object expressed the mind of God in its individuality and special place in the world.

Aquinas turned to Aristotle as an antidote to the dualism of Manichaeism. There was also contact in the 13th Century with Islam in the East. A Number of Moslem scholars were perverting Aristotle's philosophy into a type of pantheism, and (according to Chesterton), Aquinas was concerned to recover Aristotle for the Church and deliver him from Islamic distortion. This brings up the topic of Chesterton's perception of the place of Aquinas in the history of Christianity.

Aquinas' work was approved of by the authorities of the Catholic church in his lifetime. But not everyone in the Church at large agreed. Chesterton referred to his opponents as "Augustinians." I could not tell if he meant the Order, or a wider theological company. At any rate, they were the "conservatives" of their day, mildly deterministic in their views on the nature of salvation (following Augustine). Chesterton accuses them of being neo-Platonists. (Whether or not Augustine was a Platonist is beyond my knowledge. Chesterton associates Platonism with Logos Christology, which would draw the whole Eastern Church under the shadow of Plato.) At any rate, Aquinas became the victor in these debates, and his Summa is the heart of Roman Catholic theology down to the present.

But, back to Chesterton's view of history: When Aquinas won a permanent victory in Catholic thought, "Conservative" Augustinianism went underground, where it bubbled and crackled until it exploded in an Augustinian monastery in northern Germany @300 years later. Luther, Chesterton tells us, represented the counter-revolution against Aquinas' revolution of Common Sense, and carried its followers back into the murky waters of determinism and pessimism. In addition, Luther cheated. He used the force of his personality to back his theology, a thing Aquinas would never have done because he felt that asserting personality obscured the power of pure reason. (Why don't you tell us how you really feel, GK?)

Since then everything has pretty much gone downhill in Christendom, except for the fact that the Protestant descendents of the magisterial reformers have rejected the monergistic soteriology of their fathers, and returned to the synergism of Common Sense. I personally have considered this a weakness that grows out of inconsistency: An Evangelical is someone who holds to the 5 solos of the Reformation but rejects the 5 points, creating the odd stance of a man who boasts in his family name but refuses to be seen with his parents. But I digress.

No doubt this view of Church history was a bit of a shock. It reverses how every good Protestant interprets the events. But it is not the reversal of interpretation that troubles me. It is simply that it is one more interpretation to add to the multiplicity of views surrounding what I've come to call the "Story" (maybe that overlaps Aquinas' Ens?).

Perhaps Aquinas himself can help--all changeable things are moving through their potential to the Unchangeable. I wonder if in Paradise I will come to a grove of trees on a grassy knoll. Under it sit Athanasius, Aquinas, and Augustine (is it an accident that the three representatives of the divisions in Christendom start with "A"?), all giving their attention to an old lady, who is delightedly telling the story of how her prayers in a small Russian church moved the heart of God to drop winter on the Grande Armee. It is obvious that these prayers and this woman are as much at the center of the heart of God as the accomplishments of the three, and they are as enthralled with her story as with their own. Because God is at the center, all things are at the center. "For of Him, and through Him, and to Him are all things."