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by grace,
LO
. . . just as the body lives its natural life through the soul, so the soul lives the life of grace through God.
—Thomas Aquinas, In Rom. 1.6.108; trans. Fr. Fabian Richard Larcher, OP (Lander, WY: The Aquinas Institute, 2012).
Gilson’s closing line is as penetrating as his opening:
Philosophy does not consist of encouraging others to continue in false beliefs, and the worst way of persuading others to abandon their error is to appear to share the same error. There is only one truth, the same for all, and the highest good for a rational being is to know the truth. When a philosopher sees the truth he can only submit himself to it, for that is true wisdom; and when he has discovered the truth, the best thing he can do for others is share it with them, for that is true charity.
—Étienne Gilson, Thomist Realist and The Critique of Knowledge, trans. Mark A. Wauck (1986; repr. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986), 215.
In other words, speaking the truth in love is a demand not only of true faith (Eph. 4:15) but also of right reason.
. . . to any modern philosophy book:
After passing twenty centuries as the very model of those self-evident facts that only a madman would ever dream of doubting, the existence of the external world finally received its metaphysical demonstration from Descartes.
—Étienne Gilson, Thomist Realist and The Critique of Knowledge, trans. Mark A. Wauck (1986; repr. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986), 27.
. . . clearly the student of politics must know somehow the facts about soul, as the man who is to heal the eyes or the body as a whole must know about the eyes or the body; and all the more since politics is more prized and better than medicine; but even among doctors the best educated spend much labour on acquiring knowledge of the body. The student of politics, then, must study the soul, and must study it with these objects in view. . . .
—Aristotle, Ethica Nichmachea I.13, trans. W. D. Ross,
in The Works of Aristotle, vol. 9, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925).
If having doctor-like facility in promoting healthy, virtuous souls is a necessity for the study of political science, which treats man’s proximate end, how much more is this the case for the study of theological science, which treats man’s ultimate end?
Augustine points poignantly to the necessity of grace both to the sinner and to the one who avoids sinning:
“What shall I render unto the Lord,” that whilst my memory recalls these things my soul is not appalled at them? I will love Thee, O Lord, and thank Thee, and confess unto Thy name, because Thou hast put away from me these so wicked and nefarious acts of mine. To Thy grace I attribute it, and to Thy mercy, that Thou has melted away my sin as it were ice. To Thy grace also I attribute whatsoever of evil I have not committed; for what might I not have committed, loving as I did the sin for the sin’s sake? Yea, all I confess to have been pardoned me, both those which I committed by my own perverseness, and those which, by Thy guidance, I committed not. Where is he who, reflecting upon his own infirmity, dares to ascribe his chastity and innocency to his own strength, so that he should love Thee the less, as if he had been in less need of Thy mercy, whereby Thou dost forgive the transgressions of those that turn to Thee? For whosoever, called by Thee, obeyed Thy voice, and shunned those things which he reads me recalling and confessing of myself, let him not despise me, who, being sick, was healed by that same Physician by whose aid it was that he was not sick, or rather was less sick. And for this let him love Thee as much, yea, all the more, since by whom he sees me to have been restored from so great a feebleness of sin, by Him he sees himself from a like feebleness to have been preserved.
—Augustine, Confessions II.15.
Perhaps there is a small adumbration here of the restraint-of-sin aspect of the much later Protestant conceptions of gratia communis.
Time has given Ashley a new perspective on the “war between facts and ideas.” “I don’t think the Great Books is the right idea,” he says bluntly. “I do think that studying the classics is important but to start out that way”—trying to fully comprehend a classic text in a week—“is too difficult for students.” Instead, he points to metaphysics as the philosophical foundation for education: “It distinguishes different types of knowledge from each other, shows the relation between them, and finally unites them in the notion of God.” In 2006, he summarized this idea into what he describes as his “main book,” The Way Toward Wisdom, a grand overview of metaphysics in the vein of Aquinas and what might be described as Ashley’s own Summa.
Quoted from Cloth Bound: A Biographical Essay on Fr. Benedict Ashley, O.P. | Dominican Friars O.P.; HT: Tom Osborne.
Thomas Manton deduces three rules for making sound judgments in accordance with the apostle James’s command to “count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds” (James 1:2 ESV). The second is as follows:
Judge by a supernatural light. Christ’s eye-salve must clear your sight, or else you cannot make a right judgment: there is no proper and fit apprehension of things till you get within the veil, and see by the light of a sanctuary lamp: 1 Cor. ii. 11, ‘The things of God knoweth no man, but by the Spirit of God.’ He had said before, ver. 9, ‘Eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard,’ &c.; i.e., natural senses do not perceive the worth and price of spiritual privileges; for I suppose the apostle speaketh not there of the incapacity of our understandings to conceive of heavenly joys, but of the unsuitableness of spiritual objects to carnal senses. A man that hath no other light but reason and nature, cannot judge of those things; God’s riddles are only open to those that plough with God’s heifer: and it is by God’s Spirit that we come to discern and esteem the things that are of God; which is the main drift of the apostle in that chapter. So David, Ps. xxxvi. 9, ‘In thy light we shall see light;’ that is, by his Spirit we come to discern the brightness of glory or grace, and the nothingness of the world.
—Thomas Manton, The Works of Thomas Manton, vol. 4, A Practical Commentary: or an Exposition with Notes on the Epistle of James (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1871), 22.
In light of the odium commonly hurled against classical Protestant doctrine by modern Protestant theologians it is interesting to compare one of Augustine’s definitions of God with that of the Westminster Divines:
Most highest, most good, most potent, most omnipotent; most merciful, yet most just; most hidden, yet most present; most beautiful, yet most strong, stable, yet incomprehensible; unchangeable, yet all-changing; never new, never old; all-renewing, and bringing age upon the proud, and they know it not; ever working, ever at rest; still gathering, yet nothing lacking; supporting, filling, and overspreading; creating, nourishing, and maturing; seeking, yet having all things. Thou lovest, without passion; art jealous, without anxiety; repentest, yet grievest not; art angry, yet serene; changest Thy works, Thy purpose unchanged; receivest again what Thou findest, yet didst never lose; never in need, yet rejoicing in gains; never covetous, yet exacting usury. Thou receivest over and above, that Thou mayest owe; and who hath aught that is not Thine? Thou payest debts, owing nothing; remittest debts, losing nothing.
—Augustine, Confessions I.4.
God is a Spirit, in and of himself infinite in being, glory, blessedness, and perfection; all-sufficient, eternal, unchangeable, incomprehensible, every where present, almighty, knowing all things, most wise, most holy, most just, most merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth.
—Westminster Larger Catechism 7; cf. Westminster Confession of Faith II.
From Henry Martyn to Samuel Zwemer, the Christian Church has produced a notable series of missionary Arabists—notable but always too few. The tasks of each generation fall, justly and inevitably, upon the representatives of each. We in ours have great need of the consecrated scholarship which knows that dictionaries and diction, vocabulary and syntax, have much to do with the faith of “the Word made flesh.” Fascinating fields of study and of achievement are open to those who can find their way from the kingdom of God to a grammar and back again to the kingdom.
—Kenneth Cragg, The Call of the Minaret, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oneworld, 2000), 183
