Anselm And Aquinas
Although born in Alpine Italy and educated in Normandy, Anselm became
a
Benedictine monk, teacher, and abbot at Bec and continued his
ecclesiastical
career in England. Having been appointed the second Norman
archbishop of
Canterbury in 1093, Anselm secured the Westminster
Agreement of 1107,
guaranteeing the (partial) independence of the church from
the civil state. In a
series of short works such as De Libertate Arbitrii (On
Free Will), De Casu
Diaboli (The Fall of the Devil), and Cur Deus Homo
(Why God became Man), Anselm
propounded a satisfaction theory of the
atonement and defended a theology like
Augustines', that emphasized the
methodological priority of faith over reason,
since truth is to be achieved
only through "faith seeking
understanding". Anselm's combination of
Christianity, neoplatonic
metaphysics, and Aristotelean logic in the form of
dialectical
question-and-answer was an important influence in the development
of later
scholasticism. As a philosopher, Anselm is most often remembered for
his
attempts to prove the existence of god: In De Veritate (Of Truth) he
argued that
all creatures owe their being and value to god as the source of
all truth, to
whom a life lived well is the highest praise. In the Monologion
he described
deity as the one good thing from which all real moral values
derive, whose
existence is required by the reality of those values. Most
famously, in the
Proslogion (Addition), Anselm proposed the famous
Ontological Argument,
according to which god is understood as "that than
which nothing greater
can be conceived". Such a being, he argued, must
necessarily exist in
reality as well as in thought, since otherwise it would
in fact be possible to
conceive something greater--something exactly similar
except for its existence.
Thus, at least for Anselmian believers guided
by a prior faith, god must truly
exist as the simple, unified source of all
perfections, which excludes
corruption, imperfection, and deception of eve.
Reflecting on the text of Psalm
14 ("Fools say in their hearts, 'There is
no god.'") in his Proslogion,
Anselm proposed a proof of divine reality
that has come to be known as the
Ontological Argument. The argument takes
the Psalmist quite literally by
supposing that in virtue of the content of
the concept of god there is a
contradiction involved in the denial of god's
existence. Anselm supposes that in
order to affirm or deny anything about
god, we must first form in our minds the
appropriate concept, namely the
concept of "that than which nothing greater
can be conceived". Having done
so, we have in mind the idea of god. But of
course nothing about reality
usually follows from what we have in mind, since we
often think about things
that do not (or even cannot) actually exist. In the
case of this special
concept, however, Anselm argued that what we could think of
must in fact
exist independently of our thinking of it. Suppose the alternative:
if that
than which nothing greater can be conceived existed only in my mind and
not
in reality, then I could easily think of something else which would in
fact
be greater than this (namely, the same thing existing in reality as well
as in
my mind), so that what I originally contemplated turns out not in fact
to be
that than which nothing greater can be conceived. Since this is a
contradiction,
only a fool would believe it. So that than which nothing
greater can be
conceived (that is, god) must exist in reality as well as in
the mind. Born to
an aristocratic family living near Naples, Italy, Thomas
Aquinas joined the
Dominican order and studied philosophy and theology in
Naples, Paris, and Köln,
where he was exposed to Aristotelean thought by
Albert the Great and William of
Moerbeke. During the rest of his life, he
taught at Paris and Rome, writing
millions of words on philosophical and
theological issues and earning his
reputation among the scholastics as "the
angelic doctor." Aquinas
developed in massive detail a synthesis of
Christianity and Aristotelian
philosophy that became the official doctrine of
Roman Catholic theology in 1879.
De Ente et Essentia (On Being and
Essence) includes a basic statement of
Aquinas's philosophical positions.
His literary activity stopped abruptly as the
result of a religious
experience a few months before his death. Although he
wrote many commentaries
on the works of Aristotle and a comprehensive Summa de
Veritate
Catholicae Fidei contra Gentiles (Summa) Contra Gentiles)
(1259-1264),
Aquinas's unfinished Summa Theologica (1265-1273) represents
the most complete
statement of his philosophical system. The sections of
greatest interest for
survey courses include his views on the nature of god,
including the five ways
to prove god's existence, and his exposition of
natural law. Although matters of
such importance should be accepted on the
basis of divine revelation alone,
Aquinas held, it is at least possible
(and perhaps even desirable) in some
circumstances to achieve genuine
knowledge of them by means of the strict
application of human reason. As
embodied souls, human beings naturally rely on
sensory information for their
knowledge of the world. Anselm's Ontological
Argument is not acceptable,
Aquinas argued, since we are in fact ignorant of the
divine essence from
which it is presumed to begin. We cannot hope to demonstrate
the necessary
existence of a being whose true nature we cannot even conceive by
direct or
positive means. Instead, Aquinas held, we must begin with the
sensory
experiences we do understand and reason upward from them to their
origin in
something eternal. In this vein, Aquinas presented his own "Five
Ways"
to prove the existence of god. The first three of these ways are all
variations
of the Cosmological Argument. The first way is an argument from
motion, derived
fairly directly from Aristotle's Metaphysics: 1.There is
something moving.
2.Everything that moves is put into motion by something
else. 3.But this series
of antecedent movers cannot reach back infinitely.
4.Therefore, there must be a
first mover (which is god). The second way has
the same structure, but begins
from experience of an instance of efficient
cause, and the third way relies more
heavily upon a distinction between
uncertain and necessary being. Aquinas's
fourth way is a variety of Moral
Argument. It begins with the factual claim that
we do make judgments about
the relative perfection of ordinary things. But the
capacity to do so,
Aquinas argued, presupposes an absolute standard of
perfection to which we
compare everything else. This argument relies more
heavily on Platonic and
Augustinian notions, and has the advantage of defending
the existence of god
as moral exemplar rather than as abstract initiator of
reality. The fifth way
is the Teleological Argument: the order and arrangement
of the natural world
(not merely its existence) bespeaks the deliberate design
of an intelligent
creator. Although it is an argument by analogy, which can at
best offer only
probable reason for believing the truth of its conclusion, this
proof offers
a concept of god that most fully corresponds to the traditional
elements of
medieval Christian theology. Since its experiential basis lies in
our
understanding of the operation of nature, this line of reasoning tends
to
become more compelling the more thorough our scientific knowledge is
advanced.