Aquinas on Forms, Part 2

This is an extension of the conversation mentioned first in my post “Aquinas on Forms.“

How did Thomas Aquinas’s Aristotelean view of Forms differ from that of Plato? Can he be said to have denied their reality, or made it possible, by the reasonable extension of his ideas, to have facilitated Nominalism, which did so?

In Question 84 of the Summa Theologiae (Part 1), ”How the soul while united to the body understands corporeal things beneath it,” Aquinas says that ideal forms exist, but cannot be known by human intellect without our coming into contact with material species of these forms, through which our intellect can understand them. The essential articles are Article 5, “Whether the intellectual soul knows material things in the eternal types?”, and Article 6, “Whether intellectual knowledge is derived from sensible things?”

In Article 5, Aquinas accepts the existence of ideal forms, affirming Augustine, but qualifies this by saying, “But since besides the intellectual light which is in us, intelligible species, which are derived from things, are required in order for us to have knowledge of material things; therefore this same knowledge is not due merely to a participation of the eternal types, as the Platonists held, maintaining that the mere participation of ideas sufficed for knowledge.”
In Article 6, Aquinas rejects the pre-platonic idea that we know all things by “atoms”/material ways only (~nominalism?); Plato, on the other hand, said that our intellect is “an immaterial power not making use of the senses”; Aquinas owns the “middle course” of Aristotle: “For with Plato he agreed that intellect and sense are different. But he held that the sense has not its proper operation without the cooperation of the body; so that to feel is not an act of the soul alone, but of the “composite.”

So he essentially says, “Yes, forms are real and it is by means of them that we know things, but not ONLY by means of them; we also need intelligible species (particular things/physical realities) to cooperate with them in order to produce understanding.

I see this to be the most “incarnational” view, the one most unitive of the heavenly and the earthly. This is what we Anglicans mean when we say that “We need sacraments because as humans we are both spiritual and physical, and to know God, we must experience him both spiritually and physically.” Indeed it seems to be thick with the very Incarnation of God, who knew that humans could only know him if he came to them in physical form! (In subsequent Question 88, “How the human soul knows what is above itself,” Aquinas says that human intellect cannot perfectly know “immaterial substances,” i.e. angels or God, for the same reason, that they cannot know things without material species.)

Interestingly, Aquinas is favoring Aristotle’s more nuanced position over Plato’s, but he is accepting ideal forms from Plato, and even more so, he is defending and assimilating Augustine’s statements on the issues, presenting them in the “objections” and resolving them in the “replies to the objections.” It seems that it matters to him not to contradict Augustine, much more than to not contradict Plato.

If the nominalists cited Aquinas to deny the real existence of universal ideas, their argument, as far as I can see, must have been “According to Aquinas, we cannot know ideal forms without participation in species; therefore, ideal forms are not real.” This makes no sense(!?) It is like saying, “We cannot know God the Father except through God the Son; therefore, God the Father is not real”! I cannot see any way the nominalists could have validly reached their conclusion from the starting point of Aquinas; it seems, rather, that they are an antagonistic strain of thought.

Aquinas on forms

The following is an excerpt from a letter I wrote to a friend recently in discussion of Aquinas’s view of Platonic forms. It is well known that Aquinas assimilated Aristotelian metaphysics into Christianity, often by extending or clarifying the Platonic metaphysics which had sufficed to his day, largely from Augustine, who, as Aquinas says, was “imbued with the doctrines of the Platonists.” However, as I mean to demonstrate below, Aquinas did not do so by abrogating the Platonic “form” (a move that was subsequently made by Enlightenment moderns) but rather by assimilating them, I think more orthodoxly, into Christian doctrine.

I think the work you’re doing with tracing the philosophical origins of modernism back before the traditional period markers is going to be a real vital contribution. I totally agree that “the Enlightenment is the extension of late medieval nominalism,” and I love that you’re roasting the nominalists. Down with Ockham!

But I do wish to save Aquinas from the flames of your roasting. I would draw the line of blame between Aquinas and Ockham; if Ockham and the other Nominalists did “follow him,” it was not as protégés, but as robbers following someone down a dark alley.

I read one of your main lines of argument to be, essentially, that Aquinas deserves at least some blame because his philosophy lent itself, or inherently disposed itself (whether by his express intention or by culpable negligence) to the abuses of the nominalists, because it denied the real existence of Forms. You say that Aquinas “denies the existence of the Ideal Form of which individual material entities share an essence. The form/category is only something we infer from similarities of particular objects—not something actually there.” I agree that Aquinas would have taken an inadvertent first step toward modernism if he had denied the existence of forms (he would have been a sort of materialist, eh?); however, I argue that he did not.

In the Summa, I:15:1, Aquinas deals with “Ideas,” which is the Greek word which equates to the Latin forma. He asks whether there are ideas, and concludes that “it is necessary to suppose ideas in the divine mind,” since “in all things not generated by chance, the form must be the end of any generation whatsoever,” and, “as then the world was not made by chance, but by God acting by His intellect…there must exist in the divine mind a form to the likeness of which the world was made.” (He even goes on to say in Article 3 that “there are ideas of all things that God knows.”)

In his reply to Objection 1 he qualifies that “Aristotle (Metaph. ix) rejects the opinion of Plato, who held that ideas existed of themselves, and not in the intellect,” using this as an explanation for why “God does not understand things according to an idea existing outside Himself.” I sense that the temptation would be to point to this and say, “There. He says ideas do not exist of themselves. Therefore he doesn’t believe they are real, in an objective sense.” However, his statement that forms exist in the intellect cannot be taken to mean that they therefore do not really exist. Rather, the intellect is the part of rational beings which is capable of understanding things, and ideas exist within this dimension, within the “houses” of these parts of rational beings; but that they are relative or not real is ruled out by his claim that they exist in the intellect of God, because, if they exist in God’s mind, then they exist truly, and objectively, being independent of the intellect of any man.

So he says forms exist; they exist in the mind of God. But Aquinas might still be guilty of functionally denying them if he denied that men can know them.

But Aquinas says that men do indeed know the forms, or “eternal types,” when they know anything. In I:84:5 he says:

We must needs say that the human soul knows all things in the eternal types, since by participation of these types we know all things. For the intellectual light itself which is in us, is nothing else than a participated likeness of the uncreated light, in which are contained the eternal types. Whence it is written (Psalm 4:6-7), “Many say: Who showeth us good things?” which question the Psalmist answers, “The light of Thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us,” as though he were to say: By the seal of the Divine light in us, all things are made known to us.

Aquinas goes so far as to address Plato’s concept of forms, and how we ought to—indeed, how Augustine did—admit it, and yet modify it to be suitable to Christian thought:

As Augustine says (De Doctr. Christ. ii, 11): “If those who are called philosophers said by chance anything that was true and consistent with our faith, we must claim it from them as from unjust possessors. For some of the doctrines of the heathens are spurious imitations or superstitious inventions, which we must be careful to avoid when we renounce the society of the heathens.” Consequently whenever Augustine, who was imbued with the doctrines of the Platonists, found in their teaching anything consistent with faith, he adopted it: and those things which he found contrary to faith he amended. Now Plato held, as we have said above (Article 4), that the forms of things subsist of themselves apart from matter; and these he called ideas, by participation of which he said that our intellect knows all things: so that just as corporeal matter by participating the idea of a stone becomes a stone, so our intellect, by participating the same idea, has knowledge of a stone. But since it seems contrary to faith that forms of things should subsist of themselves, outside the things themselves and apart from matter, as the Platonists held, asserting that per se life or per se wisdom are creative substances, as Dionysius relates (Div. Nom. xi); therefore Augustine (QQ. 83, qu. 46), for the ideas defended by Plato, substituted the types of all creatures existing in the Divine mind, according to which types all things are made in themselves, and are known to the human soul.

Here again, we see that Aquinas accepts the existence of forms, and holds that when we know anything, it can only be by the participation of our intellect in those forms; but he corrects Plato, or rather cites Augustine’s correction, by saying that forms do not exist in themselves, for then they would be creative substances (taking the place of the Creator God), but rather they exist in the Divine mind.

What do you think? Have I missed something here, or shall we clear Aquinas of the charge?

The perpetual virginity of Mary

Growing up as a Baptist, I always assumed that Mary the mother of Jesus ceased to be a virgin after she gave birth to Jesus. This was because there were several references in the Bible to “Jesus’ brothers,” most notably James, the early church leader and author of the book of James. There’s also that passage where it says that Joseph “knew her not until she gave birth to a son,” which I always assumed to imply that, afterwards, he did “know” her. But to be honest, all of this was just assumption because, to my recollection, the idea that Mary could have or should have been perpetually a virgin never entered my mind as a distinct thought, nor was it ever brought up as a topic for direct discussion. Nevertheless, I always found it somehow weird to think about Jesus having half-brothers. Imagine my surprise to discover that the early church commonly held the view that Mary remained a virgin, and even refuted suggestions to the contrary (Jerome v. Helvidius, for example). Indeed, even the Protestant Reformers, including Calvin and Luther, believed that Mary remained a virgin!

Thanks to Matt Fradd at Pints with Aquinas for bringing this topic up, and presenting most of the points I summarize in this post. He shares in particular St. Thomas Aquinas’ statement on the matter, which, he points out, is quite strong given Aquinas’ precise and non-emotional style.

Without any hesitation we must abhor the error of Helvidius, who dared to assert that Christ’s Mother, after His Birth, was carnally known by Joseph, and bore other children. For, in the first place, this is derogatory to Christ’s perfection: for as He is in His Godhead the Only-Begotten of the Father, being thus His Son in every respect perfect, so it was becoming that He should be the Only-begotten son of His Mother, as being her perfect offspring.

Secondly, this error is an insult to the Holy Ghost, whose “shrine” was the virginal womb [“Sacrarium Spiritus Sancti” (Office of B. M. V., Ant. ad Benedictus, T. P.), wherein He had formed the flesh of Christ: wherefore it was unbecoming that it should be desecrated by intercourse with man.

Thirdly, this is derogatory to the dignity and holiness of God’s Mother: for thus she would seem to be most ungrateful, were she not content with such a Son; and were she, of her own accord, by carnal intercourse to forfeit that virginity which had been miraculously preserved in her.

Fourthly, it would be tantamount to an imputation of extreme presumption in Joseph, to assume that he attempted to violate her whom by the angel’s revelation he knew to have conceived by the Holy Ghost.

We must therefore simply assert that the Mother of God, as she was a virgin in conceiving Him and a virgin in giving Him birth, did she remain a virgin ever afterwards.

ST III Q. 28, A. 3.

Very well, then, it seems that the historical church opinion on the matter is clear, and it simply never made it into the partitioned historical context of my Evangelical world. But what of the references to Jesus’ brothers?

It is important to point out first that the term “brother” was used at that time in a more general sense, and could easily have included cousins or other relations, a fact that makes sense to me after witnessing the strong extended-family bonds of Arab culture while living in Saudi Arabia.

A commonly held view is that those brothers were not Jesus’s half-brothers, but his step-brothers, the sons of Joseph and his late wife (it is known even in evangelical scholarship that Joseph was probably much older than Mary). This is born out by the observation that, at the Cross, Jesus bequeaths care of Mary to John, something that would have been both unnecessary and inappropriate if Mary had other sons. Another connection from Arab culture: the protective duty of sons for their mother is so strong that it was not uncommon for me to hear about a youngest son being discouraged or delayed from leaving home so that the mother will not be without a caretaker and comforter. (I don’t know why the husband is insufficient, but nevertheless it underscores the cultural sentiment.)

An apocryphal but nevertheless important book from the early 2nd century, the Protoevangelium of James, narrates in detail that Mary was a consecrated virgin at the temple, and Joseph was an old widower who agreed to marry her in order to be her guardian, to house her during her monthly uncleanness. Even without digging into the validity of the book in the early church, (which I have not), it presents an interesting, scholastically viable, and Biblically compatible alternative.

As for the assumption that, because Mary was a virgin until she gave birth to Jesus, she must not have remained so afterwards, even Calvin decries the assumption as unsubstantiated, and indeed, it does not bear out from the use of the word “until” in the Greek.

So it is not obvious from the Bible that Jesus had uterine brothers, nor that Joseph knew her; and the church has long resisted and abhorred the idea. Why then would we try to argue the contrary?