The foundation of the Christian Church should be--as the simple deist might suppose--always the same, but Saint Thomas knew better.
His foundation was Norman, not French; it spoke the practical architect who knew the mathematics of his art, and who saw that the foundation laid by Saint Bernard, Saint Victor, Saint Francis, the whole mystical, semi-mystical, Cartesian, Spinozan foundation, past or future, could not bear the weight of the structure to be put on it. Thomas began by sweeping the ground clear of them. G.o.d must be a concrete thing, not a human thought. G.o.d must be proved by the senses like any other concrete thing; "nihil est in intellectu quin prius fuerit in sensu"; even if Aristotle had not affirmed the law, Thomas would have discovered it. He admitted at once that G.o.d could not be taken for granted.
The admission, as every boy-student of the Latin Quarter knew, was exceedingly bold and dangerous. The greatest logicians commonly shrank from proving unity by multiplicity. Thomas was one of the greatest logicians that ever lived; the question had always been at the bottom of theology; he deliberately challenged what every one knew to be an extreme peril. If his foundation failed, his Church fell. Many critics have thought that he saw dangers four hundred years ahead. The time came, about 1650-1700, when Descartes, deserting Saint Thomas, started afresh with the idea of G.o.d as a concept, and at once found himself charged with a deity that contained the universe; nor did the Cartesians--until Spinoza made it clear--seem able or willing to see that the Church could not accept this deity because the Church required a G.o.d who caused the universe. The two deities destroyed each other. One was pa.s.sive; the other active. Thomas warned Descartes of a logical quicksand which must necessarily swallow up any Church, and which Spinoza explored to the bottom. Thomas said truly that every true cause must be proved as a cause, not merely as a sequence; otherwise they must end in a universal energy or substance without causality--a source.
Whatever G.o.d might be to others, to His Church he could not be a sequence or a source. That point had been admitted by William of Champeaux, and made the division between Christians and infidels. On the other hand, if G.o.d must be proved as a true cause in order to warrant the Church or the State in requiring men to worship Him as Creator, the student became the more curious--if a churchman, the more anxious--to be a.s.sured that Thomas succeeded in his proof, especially since he did not satisfy Descartes and still less Pascal.
That the mystics should be dissatisfied was natural enough, since they were committed to the contrary view, but that Descartes should desert was a serious blow which threw the French Church into consternation from which it never quite recovered.
"I see motion," said Thomas: "I infer a motor!" This reasoning, which may be fifty thousand years old, is as strong as ever it was; stronger than some more modern inferences of science; but the average mechanic stated it differently. "I see motion," he admitted: "I infer energy. I see motion everywhere; I infer energy everywhere." Saint Thomas barred this door to materialism by adding: "I see motion; I cannot infer an infinite series of motors: I can only infer, somewhere at the end of the series, an intelligent, fixed motor." The average modern mechanic might not dissent but would certainly hesitate. "No doubt!" he might say; "we can conduct our works as well on that as on any other theory, or as we could on no theory at all; but, if you offer it as proof, we can only say that we have not yet reduced all motion to one source or all energies to one law, much less to one act of creation, although we have tried our best." The result of some centuries of experiment tended to raise rather than silence doubt, although, even in his own day, Thomas would have been scandalized beyond the resources of his Latin had Saint Bonaventure met him at Saint Louis"s dinner-table and complimented him, in the King"s hearing, on having proved, beyond all Franciscan cavils, that the Church Intellectual had necessarily but one first cause and creator--himself.
The Church Intellectual, like the Church Architectural, implied not one architect, but myriads, and not one fixed, intelligent architect at the end of the series, but a vanishing vista without a beginning at any definite moment; and if Thomas pressed his argument, the twentieth-century mechanic who should attend his conferences at the Sorbonne would be apt to say so. "What is the use of trying to argue me into it? Your inference may be sound logic, but is not proof.
Actually we know less about it than you did. All we know is the thing we handle, and we cannot handle your fixed, intelligent prime motor. To your old ideas of form we have added what we call force, and we are rather further than ever from reducing the complex to unity. In fact, if you are aiming to convince me, I will tell you flatly that I know only the multiple, and have no use for unity at all."
In the thirteenth century men did not depend so much as now on actual experiment, but the nominalist said in effect the same thing.
Unity to him was a pure concept, and any one who thought it real would believe that a triangle was alive and could walk on its legs.
Without proving unity, philosophers saw no way to prove G.o.d. They could only fall back on an attempt to prove that the concept of unity proved itself, and this phantasm drove the Cartesians to drop Thomas"s argument and a.s.sert that "the mere fact of having within us the idea of a thing more perfect than ourselves, proves the real existence of that thing." Four hundred years earlier Saint Thomas had replied in advance that Descartes wanted to prove altogether too much, and Spinoza showed mathematically that Saint Thomas had been in the right. The finest religious mind of the time--Pascal-- admitted it and gave up the struggle, like the mystics of Saint- Victor.
Thus some of the greatest priests and professors of the Church, including Duns Scotus himself, seemed not wholly satisfied that Thomas"s proof was complete, but most of them admitted that it was the safest among possible foundations, and that it showed, as architecture, the Norman temper of courage and caution. The Norman was ready to run great risks, but he would rather grasp too little than too much; he narrowed the s.p.a.cing of his piers rather than spread them too wide for safe vaulting. Between Norman blood and Breton blood was a singular gap, as Renan and every other Breton has delighted to point out. Both Abelard and Descartes were Breton. The Breton seized more than he could hold; the Norman took less than he would have liked.
G.o.d, then, is proved. What the schools called form, what science calls energy, and what the intermediate period called the evidence of design, made the foundation of Saint Thomas"s cathedral. G.o.d is an intelligent, fixed prime motor--not a concept, or proved by concepts;--a concrete fact, proved by the senses of sight and touch.
On that foundation Thomas built. The walls and vaults of his Church were more complex than the foundation; especially the towers were troublesome. Dogma, the vital purpose of the Church, required support. The most weighty dogma, the central tower of the Norman cathedral, was the Trinity, and between the Breton solution which was too heavy, and the French solution which was too light, the Norman Thomas found a way. Remembering how vehemently the French Church, under Saint Bernard, had protected the Trinity from all interference whatever, one turns anxiously to see what Thomas said about it; and unless one misunderstands him,--as is very likely, indeed, to be the case, since no one may even profess to understand the Trinity,--Thomas treated it as simply as he could. "G.o.d, being conscious of Himself, thinks Himself; his thought is Himself, his own reflection in the Verb--the so-called Son." "Est in Deo intelligente seipsum Verb.u.m Dei quasi Deus intellectus." The idea was not new, and as ideas went it was hardly a mystery; but the next step was naif:--G.o.d, as a double consciousness, loves Himself, and realizes Himself in the Holy Ghost. The third side of the triangle is love or grace.
Many theologians have found fault with this treatment of the subject, which seemed open to every objection that had been made to Abelard, Gilbert de la Poree, or a thousand other logicians. They commonly asked why Thomas stopped the Deity"s self-realizations at love, or inside the triangle, since these realizations were real, not symbolic, and the square was at least as real as any other combination of line. Thomas replied that knowledge and will--the Verb and the Holy Ghost--were alone essential. The reply did not suit every one, even among doctors, but since Saint Thomas rested on this simple a.s.sertion, it is no concern of ours to argue the theology. Only as art, one can afford to say that the form is more architectural than religious; it would surely have been suspicious to Saint Bernard. Mystery there was none, and logic little. The concept of the Holy Ghost was childlike; for a pupil of Aristotle it was inadmissible, since it led to nothing and helped no step toward the universe.
Admitting, if necessary, the criticism, Thomas need not admit the blame, if blame there were. Every theologian was obliged to stop the pursuit of logic by force, before it dragged him into paganism and pantheism. Theology begins with the universal,--G.o.d,--who must be a reality, not a symbol; but it is forced to limit the process of G.o.d"s realizations somewhere, or the priest soon becomes a worshipper of G.o.d in sticks and stones. Theologists had commonly chosen, from time immemorial, to stop at the Trinity; within the triangle they were wholly realist; but they could not admit that G.o.d went on to realize Himself in the square and circle, or that the third member of the Trinity contained multiplicity, because the Trinity was a restless weight on the Church piers, which, like the central tower, constantly tended to fall, and needed to be lightened. Thomas gave it the lightest form possible, and there fixed it.
Then came his great tour-de-force, the vaulting of his broad nave; and, if ignorance is allowed an opinion, even a lost soul may admire the grand simplicity of Thomas"s scheme. He swept away the horizontal lines altogether, leaving them barely as a part of decoration. The whole weight of his arches fell, as in the latest Gothic, where the eye sees nothing to break the sheer spring of the nervures, from the rosette on the keystone a hundred feet above down to the church floor. In Thomas"s creation nothing intervened between G.o.d and his world; secondary causes become ornaments; only two forces, G.o.d and man, stood in the Church.
The chapter of Creation is so serious, and Thomas"s creation, like every other, is open to so much debate, that no student can allow another to explain it; and certainly no man whatever, either saint or sceptic, can ever yet have understood Creation aright unless divinely inspired; but whatever Thomas"s theory was as he meant it, he seems to be understood as holding that every created individual-- animal, vegetable, or mineral--was a special, divine act. Whatever has form is created, and whatever is created takes form directly from the will of G.o.d, which is also his act. The intermediate universals--the secondary causes--vanish as causes; they are, at most, sequences or relations; all merge in one universal act of will; instantaneous, infinite, eternal.
Saint Thomas saw G.o.d, much as Milton saw him, resplendent in
That glorious form, that light unsufferable, And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty, Wherewith he wont, at Heaven"s high council-table, To sit the midst of Trinal Unity;
except that, in Thomas"s thought, the council-table was a work- table, because G.o.d did not take counsel; He was an act. The Trinity was an infinite possibility of will; nothing within but
The baby image of the giant ma.s.s Of things to come at large.
Neither time nor s.p.a.ce, neither matter nor mind, not even force existed, nor could any intelligence conceive how, even though they should exist, they could be united in the lowest a.s.sociation. A crystal was as miraculous as Socrates. Only abstract force, or what the schoolmen called form, existed undeveloped from eternity, like the abstract line in mathematics.
Fifty or a hundred years before Saint Thomas settled the Church dogma, a monk of Citeaux or some other abbey, a certain Alain of Lille, had written a Latin poem, as abstruse an allegory as the best, which had the merit of painting the scene of man"s creation as far as concerned the mechanical process much as Thomas seems to have seen it. M. Haureau has printed an extract (vol. I, p. 352). Alain conceded to the weakness of human thought, that G.o.d was working in time and s.p.a.ce, or rather on His throne in heaven, when nature, proposing to create a new and improved man, sent Reason and Prudence up to ask Him for a soul to fit the new body. Having pa.s.sed through various adventures and much scholastic instruction, the messenger Prudence arrived, after having dropped her dangerous friend Reason by the way. The request was respectfully presented to G.o.d, and favourably received. G.o.d promised the soul, and at once sent His servant Noys--Thought--to the storehouse of ideas, to choose it:--
Ipse Deus rem prosequitur, producit in actum Quod pepigit. Vocat ergo Noym quae praepaert illi Numinis exemplar, humanae mentis Idaeam, Ad cujus formam formetur spiritus omni Munere virtutum dives, qui, nube caducae Carnis odumbratus veletur corporis umbra.
Tunc Noys ad regis praeceptum singula rerum
Vestigans exempla, novam perquirit Idaeam.
Inter tot species, speciem vix invenit illam Quam pet.i.t; offertur tandem quaesita petenti . Hanc formam Noys ipsa Deo praesentat ut ejus Formet ad exemplar animam. Tunc ille sigillum Sumit, ad ipsius formae vestigia formam Dans animae, vultum qualem deposcit Idaea Imprimit exemplo; totas usurpat imago Exemplaris opes, loquiturque figura sigillum.
G.o.d Himself pursues the task, and sets in act What He promised. So He calls Noys to seek A copy of His will, Idea of the human mind, To whose form the spirit should be shaped, Rich in every virtue, which, veiled in garb Of frail flesh, is to be hidden in a shade of body, Then Noys, at the King"s order, turning one by one
Each sample, seeks the new Idea.
Among so many images she hardly finds that Which she seeks; at last the sought one appears.
This form Noys herself brings to G.o.d for Him To form a soul to its pattern. He takes the seal, And gives form to the soul after the model Of the form itself, stamping on the sample The figure such as the Idea requires. The seal Covers the whole field, and the impression expresses the stamp.
The translation is probably full of mistakes; indeed, one is permitted to doubt whether Alain himself accurately understood the process; but in substance he meant that G.o.d contained a storehouse of ideas, and stamped each creation with one of these forms. The poets used a variety of figures to help out their logic, but that of the potter and his pot was one of the most common. Omar Khayyam was using it at the same time with Alain of Lille, but with a difference: for his pot seems to have been matter alone, and his soul was the wine it received from G.o.d; while Alain"s soul seems to have been the form and not the contents of the pot.
The figure matters little. In any case G.o.d"s act was the union of mind with matter by the same act or will which created both. No intermediate cause or condition intervened; no secondary influence had anything whatever to do with the result. Time had nothing to do with it. Every individual that has existed or shall exist was created by the same instantaneous act, for all time. "When the question regards the universal agent who produces beings and time, we cannot consider him as acting now and before, according to the succession of time." G.o.d emanated time, force, matter, mind, as He might emanate gravitation, not as a part of His substance but as an energy of His will, and maintains them in their activity by the same act, not by a new one. Every individual is a part of the direct act; not a secondary outcome. The soul has no father or mother. Of all errors one of the most serious is to suppose that the soul descends by generation. "Having life and action of its own, it subsists without the body; ... it must therefore be produced directly, and since it is not a material substance, it cannot be produced by way of generation; it must necessarily be created by G.o.d. Consequently to suppose that the intelligence [or intelligent soul] is the effect of generation is to suppose that it is not a pure and simple substance, but corruptible like the body. It is therefore heresy to say that this soul is transmitted by generation." What is true of the soul should be true of all other form, since no form is a material substance. The utmost possible relation between any two individuals is that G.o.d may have used the same stamp or mould for a series of creations, and especially for the less spiritual: "G.o.d is the first model for all things. One may also say that, among His creatures some serve as types or models for others because there are some which are made in the image of others"; but generation means sequence, not cause. The only true cause is G.o.d. Creation is His sole act, in which no second cause can share." Creation is more perfect and loftier than generation, because it aims at producing the whole substance of the being, though it starts from absolute nothing."
Thomas Aquinas, when he pleased, was singularly lucid, and on this point he was particularly positive. The architect insisted on the controlling idea of his structure. The Church was G.o.d, and its lines excluded interference. G.o.d and the Church embraced all the converging lines of the universe, and the universe showed none but lines that converged. Between G.o.d and man, nothing whatever intervened. The individual was a compound of form, or soul, and matter; but both were always created together, by the same act, out of nothing. "Simpliciter fatendum est animas simul c.u.m corporibus creari et infundi." It must be distinctly understood that souls were not created before bodies, but that they were created at the same time as the bodies they animate. Nothing whatever preceded this union of two substances which did not exist: "Creatio est productio alicujus rei secundum suam totam substantiam, nullo praesupposito, quod sit vel increatum vel ab aliquo creatum." Language can go no further in exclusion of every possible preceding, secondary, or subsequent cause, "Productio universalis entis a Deo non est motus nec mutatio, sed est quaedam simplex emanatio." The whole universe is, so to speak, a simple emanation from G.o.d.
The famous junction, then, is made!--that celebrated fusion of the universal with the individual, of unity with multiplicity, of G.o.d and nature, which had broken the neck of every philosophy ever invented; which had ruined William of Champeaux and was to ruin Descartes; this evolution of the finite from the infinite was accomplished. The supreme triumph was as easily effected by Thomas Aquinas as it was to be again effected, four hundred years later, by Spinoza. He had merely to a.s.sert the fact: "It is so! it cannot be otherwise!" "For the thousandth and hundred-thousandth time;--what is the use of discussing this prime motor, this Spinozan substance, any longer? We know it is there!" that--as Professor Haeckel very justly repeats for the millionth time--is enough.
One point, however, remained undetermined. The Prime Motor and His action stood fixed, and no one wished to disturb Him; but this was not the point that had disturbed William of Champeaux. Abelard"s question still remained to be answered. How did Socrates differ from Plato--Judas from John--Thomas Aquinas from Professor Haeckel? Were they, in fact, two, or one? What made an individual? What was G.o.d"s centimetre measure? The abstract form or soul which existed as a possibility in G.o.d, from all time,--was it one or many? To the Church, this issue overshadowed all else, for, if humanity was one and not multiple, the Church, which dealt only with individuals, was lost. To the schools, also, the issue was vital, for, if the soul or form was already multiple from the first, unity was lost; the ultimate substance and prime motor itself became multiple; the whole issue was reopened.
To the consternation of the Church, and even of his own order, Thomas, following closely his masters, Albert and Aristotle, a.s.serted that the soul was measured by matter. "Division occurs in substances in ratio of quant.i.ty, as Aristotle says in his "Physics."
And so dimensional quant.i.ty is a principle of individuation." The soul is a fluid absorbed by matter in proportion to the absorptive power of the matter. The soul is an energy existing in matter proportionately to the dimensional quant.i.ty of the matter. The soul is a wine, greater or less in quant.i.ty according to the size of the cup. In our report of the great debate of 1110, between Champeaux and Abelard, we have seen William persistently tempting Abelard to fall into this admission that matter made the man;--that the universal equilateral triangle became an individual if it were shaped in metal, the matter giving it reality which mere form could not give; and Abelard evading the issue as though his life depended on it. In fact, had Abelard dared to follow Aristotle into what looked like an admission that Socrates and Plato were identical as form and differed only in weight, his life might have been the forfeit. How Saint Thomas escaped is a question closely connected with the same inquiry about Saint Francis of a.s.sisi. A Church which embraced, with equal sympathy, and within a hundred years, the Virgin, Saint Bernard, William of Champeaux and the School of Saint- Victor, Peter the Venerable, Saint Francis of a.s.sisi, Saint Dominic, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Saint Bonaventure, was more liberal than any modern State can afford to be. Radical contradictions the State may perhaps tolerate, though hardly, but never embrace or profess.
Such elasticity long ago vanished from human thought.
Yet only Dominicans believe that the Church adopted this law of individualization, or even a.s.sented to it. If M. Jourdain is right, Thomas was quickly obliged to give it another form:--that, though all souls belonged to the same species, they differed in their apt.i.tudes for uniting with particular bodies. "This soul is commensurate with this body, and not with that other one." The idea is double; for either the souls individualized themselves, and Thomas abandoned his doctrine of their instantaneous creation, with the bodies, out of nothing; or G.o.d individualized them in the act of creation, and matter had nothing to do with it. The difficulty is no concern of ours, but the great scholars who took upon themselves to explain it made it worse, until at last one gathers only that Saint Thomas held one of three views: either the soul of humanity was individualized by G.o.d, or it individualized itself, or it was divided by ratio of quant.i.ty, that is, by matter. This amounts to saying that one knows nothing about it, which we knew before and may admit with calmness; but Thomas Aquinas was not so happily placed, between the Church and the schools. Humanity had a form common to itself, which made it what it was. By some means this form was a.s.sociated with matter; in fact, matter was only known as a.s.sociated with form. If, then, G.o.d, by an instantaneous act, created matter and gave it form according to the dimensions of the matter, innocent ignorance might infer that there was, in the act of G.o.d, one world- soul and one world-matter, which He united in different proportions to make men and things. Such a doctrine was fatal to the Church. No greater heresy could be charged against the worst Arab or Jew, and Thomas was so well aware of his danger that he recoiled from it with a vehemence not at all in keeping with his supposed phlegm. With feverish eagerness to get clear of such companions, he denied and denounced, in all companies, in season and out of season, the idea that intellect was one and the same for all men, differing only with the quant.i.ty of matter it accompanied. He challenged the adherent of such a doctrine to battle; "let him take the pen if he dares!" No one dared, seeing that even Jews enjoyed a share of common sense and had seen some of their friends burn at the stake not very long before for such opinions, not even openly maintained; while uneducated people, who are perhaps incapable of receiving intellect at all, but for whose instruction and salvation the great work of Saint Thomas and his scholars must chiefly exist, cannot do battle because they cannot understand Thomas"s doctrine of matter and form which to them seems frank pantheism.
So it appeared to Duns Scotus also, if one may a.s.sert in the Doctor Subtilis any opinion without qualification. Duns began his career only about 1300, after Thomas"s death, and stands, therefore, beyond our horizon; but he is still the pride of the Franciscan Order and stands second in authority to the great Dominican alone. In denying Thomas"s doctrine that matter individualizes mind, Duns laid himself open to the worse charge of investing matter with a certain embryonic, independent, shadowy soul of its own. Scot"s system, compared with that of Thomas, tended toward liberty. Scot held that the excess of power in Thomas"s prime motor neutralized the power of his secondary causes, so that these appeared altogether superfluous.
This is a point that ought to be left to the Church to decide, but there can be no harm in quoting, on the other hand, the authority of some of Scot"s critics within the Church, who have thought that his doctrine tended to deify matter and to keep open the road to Spinoza. Narrow and dangerous was the border-line always between pantheism and materialism, and the chief interest of the schools was in finding fault with each other"s paths.
The opinions in themselves need not disturb us, although the question is as open to dispute as ever it was and perhaps as much disputed; but the turn of Thomas"s mind is worth study. A century or two later, his pa.s.sion to be reasonable, scientific, architectural would have brought him within range of the Inquisition. Francis of a.s.sisi was not more archaic and cave-dweller than Thomas of Aquino was modern and scientific. In his effort to be logical he forced his Deity to be as logical as himself, which hardly suited Omnipotence.
He hewed the Church dogmas into shape as though they were rough stones. About no dogma could mankind feel interest more acute than about that of immortality, which seemed to be the single point vitally necessary for any Church to prove and define as clearly as light itself. Thomas trimmed down the soul to half its legitimate claims as an immortal being by insisting that G.o.d created it from nothing in the same act or will by which He created the body and united the two in time and s.p.a.ce. The soul existed as form for the body, and had no previous existence. Logic seemed to require that when the body died and dissolved, after the union which had lasted, at most, only an instant or two of eternity, the soul, which fitted that body and no other, should dissolve with it. In that case the Church dissolved, too, since it had no reason for existence except the soul. Thomas met the difficulty by suggesting that the body"s form might take permanence from the matter to which it gave form.
That matter should individualize mind was itself a violent wrench of logic, but that it should also give permanence--the one quality it did not possess--to this individual mind seemed to many learned doctors a scandal. Perhaps Thomas meant to leave the responsibility on the Church, where it belonged as a matter not of logic but of revealed truth. At all events, this treatment of mind and matter brought him into trouble which few modern logicians would suspect.
The human soul having become a person by contact with matter, and having gained eternal personality by the momentary union, was finished, and remains to this day for practical purposes unchanged; but the angels and devils, a world of realities then more real than man, were never united with matter, and therefore could not be persons. Thomas admitted and insisted that the angels, being immaterial,--neither clothed in matter, nor stamped on it, nor mixed with it,--were universals; that is, each was a species in himself, a cla.s.s, or perhaps what would be now called an energy, with no other individuality than he gave himself.
The idea seems to modern science reasonable enough. Science has to deal, for example, with scores of chemical energies which it knows little about except that they always seem to be constant to the same conditions; but every one knows that in the particular relation of mind to matter the battle is as furious as ever. The soul has always refused to live in peace with the body. The angels, too, were always in rebellion. They insisted on personality, and the devils even more obstinately than the angels. The dispute was--and is--far from trifling. Mind would rather ignore matter altogether. In the thirteenth century mind did, indeed, admit that matter was something,--which it quite refuses to admit in the twentieth,--but treated it as a nuisance to be abated. To the pure in spirit one argued in vain that spirit must compromise; that nature compromised; that G.o.d compromised; that man himself was nothing but a somewhat clumsy compromise. No argument served. Mind insisted on absolute despotism. Schoolmen as well as mystics would not believe that matter was what it seemed,--if, indeed, it existed;--unsubstantial, shifty, shadowy; changing with incredible swiftness into dust, gas, flame; vanishing in mysterious lines of force into s.p.a.ce beyond hope of recovery; whirled about in eternity and infinity by that mind, form, energy, or thought which guides and rules and tyrannizes and is the universe. The Church wanted to be pure spirit; she regarded matter with antipathy as something foul, to be held at arms" length lest it should stain and corrupt the soul; the most she would willingly admit was that mind and matter might travel side by side, like a doubleheaded comet, on parallel lines that never met, with a preestablished harmony that existed only in the prime motor.
Thomas and his master Albert were almost alone in imposing on the Church the compromise so necessary for its equilibrium. The balance of matter against mind was the same necessity in the Church Intellectual as the balance of thrusts in the arch of the Gothic cathedral. Nowhere did Thomas show his architectural obstinacy quite so plainly as in thus taking matter under his protection. Nothing would induce him to compromise with the angels. He insisted on keeping man wholly apart, as a complex of energies in which matter shared equally with mind. The Church must rest firmly on both. The angels differed from other beings below them" precisely because they were immaterial and impersonal. Such rigid logic outraged the spiritual Church.
Perhaps Thomas"s sudden death in 1274 alone saved him from the fate of Abelard, but it did not save his doctrine. Two years afterwards, in 1276, the French and English churches combined to condemn it.
Etienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris, presided over the French Synod; Robert Kilwardeby, of the Dominican Order, Archbishop of Canterbury, presided over the Council at Oxford. The synods were composed of schoolmen as well as churchmen, and seem to have been the result of a serious struggle for power between the Dominican and Franciscan Orders. Apparently the Church compromised between them by condemning the errors of both. Some of these errors, springing from Alexander Hales and his Franciscan schools, were in effect the foundation of another Church. Some were expressly charged against Brother Thomas.
"Contra fratrem Thomam" the councils forbade teaching that--"quia intelligentiae non habent materiam, Deus non potest plures ejusdem speciei facere; et quod materia non est in angelis"; further, the councils struck at the vital centre of Thomas"s system--"quod Deus non potest individua multiplicare sub una specie sine materia"; and again in its broadest form,--"quod formae non accipiunt divisionem nisi secundam materiam." These condemnations made a great stir. Old Albertus Magnus, who was the real victim of attack, fought for himself and for Thomas. After a long and earnest effort, the Thomists rooted out opposition in the order, and carried their campaign to Rome. After fifty years of struggle, by use of every method known in Church politics, the Dominican Order, in 1323, caused John XXII to canonize Thomas and in effect affirm his doctrine.
The story shows how modern, how heterodox, how material, how altogether new and revolutionary the system of Saint Thomas seemed at first even in the schools; but that was the affair of the Church and a matter of pure theology. We study only his art. Step by step, stone by stone, we see him build his church-building like a stonemason, "with the care that the twelfth-century architects put into" their work, as Viollet-le-Duc saw some similar architect at Rouen, building the tower of Saint-Romain: "He has thrown over his work the grace and finesse, the study of detail, the sobriety in projections, the perfect harmony," which belongs to his school, and yet he was rigidly structural and Norman. The foundation showed it; the elevation, which is G.o.d, developed it; the vaulting, with its balance of thrusts in mind and matter, proved it; but he had still the hardest task in art, to model man.
The cathedral, then, is built, and G.o.d is built into it, but, thus far, G.o.d is there alone, filling it all, and maintains the equilibrium by balancing created matter separately against created mind. The proportions of the building are superb; nothing so lofty, so large in treatment, so true in scale, so eloquent of multiplicity in unity, has ever been conceived elsewhere; but it was the virtue or the fault of superb structures like Bourges and Amiens and the Church universal that they seemed to need man more than man needed them; they were made for crowds, for thousands and tens of thousands of human beings; for the whole human race, on its knees, hungry for pardon and love. Chartres needed no crowd, for it was meant as a palace of the Virgin, and the Virgin filled it wholly; but the Trinity made their church for no other purpose than to accommodate man, and made man for no other purpose than to fill their church; if man failed to fill it, the church and the Trinity seemed equally failures. Empty, Bourges and Beauvais are cold; hardly as religious as a wayside cross; and yet, even empty, they are perhaps more religious than when filled with cattle and machines. Saint Thomas needed to fill his Church with real men, and although he had created his own G.o.d for that special purpose, the task was, as every boy knew by heart, the most difficult that Omnipotence had dealt with.
G.o.d, as Descartes justly said, we know! but what is man? The schools answered: Man is a rational animal! So was apparently a dog, or a bee, or a beaver, none of which seemed to need churches. Modern science, with infinite effort, has discovered and announced that man is a bewildering complex of energies, which helps little to explain his relations with the ultimate substance or energy or prime motor whose existence both science and schoolmen admit; which science studies in laboratories and religion worships in churches. The man whom G.o.d created to fill his Church, must be an energy independent of G.o.d; otherwise G.o.d filled his own Church with his own energy.
Thus far, the G.o.d of Saint Thomas was alone in His Church. The beings He had created out of nothing--Omar"s pipkins of clay and shape--stood against the walls, waiting to receive the wine of life, a life of their own.