A Companion to the Summa, Volume 1: Chapters 11-15

(audio coming soon)

A Companion to the Summa

CHAPTER XI — ANGELIC SAINTS AND SINNERS Q. 59-60; 62-64)

1. Sanctity and sin in an emotional world.

2. Enthronement of emotion:

    (a) The fact.

    (b) Its excuses.

    (c) Its reasons.

3. Emotion and the appetite of man.

4. Appetite of the angels:

    (a) Its nature — free will.

    (b) Its distinction from nature and intellect.

    (c) Its denial of emotion.

5. The love of the angels:

    (a) Its nature: necessary and elective.

    (b) Its objects.

    (c) Its goal.

6. The sin of the angels:

    (a) Possible sins.

    (b) The actual sin:

               (1) Its object.

               (2) Its sponsor.

               (3) Number of angelic sinners.

               (4) The punishment of the sin.

Conclusion:

1. Human nature seen in the light of angelic saints and sins

  (a) Potentialities for good.

  (b) Potentialities for evil.

2. Consequences in men of angelic virtue and sin:

  (a) Humility.

  (b) Fear.

  (c) Self-respect.

CHAPTER XI ANGELIC SAINTS AND SINNERS
(Q. 59-60; 62-62) 

Sanctity and sin in an emotional world

OUR modern world has enthroned emotion as the ruler of life and day by day new subjects throng to the palace to be presented to life’s royalty. Some men make their obeisance to the brutally rough emotions that answer arguments by blows, that glory in butting against a tree instead of side-stepping it. and relax to the crunching of bones; others bow their heads to the squishy variety of emotion, the soft, deadly things that keep a man in a state of collapse before uncouth life.

Enthronement of emotion 

This emotional surge has not been a purely popular outbreak incited by sensational journalism. It goes much deeper than that. In fact, from the intellectual beginnings of the modern era to our own day, it has come from the top down; it is the logical outcome of subjectivism in religion and rationalism in philosophy. Surely the ordinary run of men can, to some extent, be excused for accepting the distorted photograph of a purely emotional man. They have been led into this thing by their leaders; coaxed, bullied, laughed, argued, threatened into it. As a result, however innocent of his plight the individual may be, man today finds himself in the strangely inhuman world where sanctity and sin are obsolete words faintly recalling the time when religion was not a matter of feeling, conversion a kind of epileptic fit, salvation a matter of that good feeling that comes from digestive perfection. From the very existence of the words sanctity and sin, one gathers that once upon a time men did not know they were ruled by biological necessity, thought they were possessed of a free will that gave them command of their lives, that moral codes were not a societal fashion and that men were different from animals. 

The fact 

If the world were such as our moderns paint it, sanctity and sin would have no more place among men than they have among puppies or roses; for sanctity, like sin, is the fruit of a controlled appetite making its choice under the deliberate direction of one who is in command of his actions. That emotion plays a supreme role in the life below man is beyond question; but this life is below man. That emotion plays a large part in man’s life needs no demonstration; but that we should come to think of emotion pushing man, willy-nilly, from birth to death, almost defies explanation. 

Its excuses 

Perhaps it would not have happened, in spite of philosophy’s attempted assassination of the intellect, religion’s metamorphosis of faith from an intellectual virtue to a feeling, and the constant barrage of the sensible laid about the heart of a man, if we had held fast to the antidote for this over-familiarity with the material world. Unfortunately, we allowed ourselves to become strangers to that spiritual world of the angels, relegating it to the region of myths, fairy tales and poetry. As a result, we have concentrated on one side of our nature to the complete neglect of the other and become as lop-sided as slaves perpetually chained to the same side of a Roman galley. 

Its reasons 

Our nature entitles us to a welcome on both sides of the railroad tracks. We cannot spend all our time with the angels under penalty of becoming so queer that even the angels, for all their charity, will have nothing to do with us; we cannot throw in our lot with the animals without becoming so bestial as to frighten the beasts. The animal has a place in our lives, as has also the angelic; but neither the one nor the other can carry on a war of extermination without destroying itself. If the truth be told, we are nearer to the angels than to the beasts, for it is the spiritual within us that is in command; familiarity with the angels, consequently, carries none of the immediate threats involved in rooting with the animals. 

Emotion and the appetites of man 

Certainly the place of the emotions, the movements of his sense appetite, in man is made startlingly clear by a consideration of the appetite of the angels. For, of course, the angels have appetite. In an earlier chapter, treating of the will of God, it was pointed out that will is to intelligent beings what sense appetite is to the animals — the mainspring of action. Absolutely everything has within itself a tendency or inclination to its full perfection and to all that pertains to that perfection; an inclination that finds its expression either in straining to the attainment of that perfection or in enjoying that perfection once it is possessed. The general term for the faculty from which this inclination proceeds is appetite. Our long, intimate acquaintance with and respect for the world about us moves us courteously to extend the term to things incapable of knowledge and call it natural appetite. But the extension of the term is sheer courtesy; for these things do not move so much as they are moved, inexorably following the course laid out for them by the knowledge of God. 

In the animals, this appetite is sense appetite; in intelligent creatures it is will. In both, this faculty of desire is completely blind. Nor is it to be pitied or sneered at in its blindness. It is supposed to be blind. Its work is not to know but to desire; if it does that, as it always does, we can ask no more of it. It makes no attempt to take over the work of the faculty of knowledge, it does not peer into the future with sightless eyes or plunge ahead before a guiding hand offers its absolutely necessary direction. Nor can it improve on the light thrown before it by the faculty of knowledge: a dog does not dig his paws deeper in dry weather as a plant does its roots. the dog simply looks for a shady spot; a man does not dig for bones or eat a special kind of grass, but he does seek for truth, for love and for happiness, a quest that never disturbs the contentment of a dog. In other words, the appetite of any creature is of the same caliber as its knowledge. 

Appetite of the angels 

When the creature in question is a complex combination of the material and spiritual, possessed of sensible and intellectual knowledge, as is man, there will, of course, be two appetites present: the sensible and the intellectual which is called will. The noise of battle within the household of his soul will not let a man seriously doubt the presence of these two appetites; for they get along much less equably than the jealous wives of a polygamous chieftain. When the creature in question has the splendid immateriality of an angel with its unadulterated intellectual knowledge, its appetite will be the intellectual appetite or will with no rival quibbling about its choices. 

Its nature — free will 

To say that the will of the angels is a free will is to say no more than must be said of will wherever it is found. A noisy child with a penchant for hammering the furniture may indeed turn out to be an excellent boiler maker when he grows up; but because he can see the impediments to pleasant chitchat involved in such a vocation, he can, if he likes, refuse to follow his natural bent. For intellectual knowledge can know supreme truth and thus open the way for the will to desire supreme goodness; but the intellect can also know particular truths and the reasons for their particularity, their limitations. Because of these limitations the will can and does accept or reject them, that is, the will is free. Not everyone who likes putting out fires becomes a fireman, quite possibly because one so heartily dislikes being doused with water in zero weather The point is that an intelligent creature. in the face of particular goods, can always choose because he can always see not only the goodness but also the particularity, the limitation, of that goodness. 

Its distinction from nature and intellect 

The angelic nature must definitely stay at home, eternally bound within its own limits; the angelic intellect is a hostess that sees all the world but only within the walls of its own house; while the angelic will is a visiting vagrant that wanders the length and breadth of the fields thrown open to it by angelic knowledge. The angelic intellect, like all intellects, is eternally at home, but in a home filled with a cosmopolitan group of guests, all of whom must follow the rules of the house; the angelic will goes out to the objects desired uniting itself to them. It is this characteristic of intellect and will that is so trenchantly expressed in the statement that an intelligent creature becomes what he desires but makes what he knows a part of himself. He can know muck without soiling the intellect, but he cannot desire it without smearing himself. Obviously, then, the free will of an angel is something quite distinct from the angelic nature and from the angelic intellect. 

Its denial of emotion 

While it is true that an angel can know and will, it is also unquestionably true that an angel cannot feel the excitement of racing blood, tragedy’s sudden stab in the heart; it cannot be carried outside of itself with anger, faint at the sight of a snake or be overwhelmed by a rush of sorrow. For there is no room in the angels for emotions in the sense of passions or feelings. The angels, you see, have no bodies; and these passions are distinctly sensible or animal, movements of the sense appetite. 

Lest we rush to the conclusion that angels are cold, clammy, impersonal creatures, it would be well to remember that an angel’s joyous song heralded the Savior’s arrival in Bethlehem: that an angel shared the agony of Christ in the Garden — and comforted Him; that the archangel Gabriel minced no words in reply to Zachary’s disbelief of his message and did not hesitate to rap him sharply on the knuckles with that severe sentence, “thou shalt be dumb.” Yet it was this same severe angel who immediately appreciated Mary’s fear and surprise, and his first words were words of assurance to dispel that fear; the archangel Raphael was a matchmaker of the first order, smoothing the way for the seemingly impossible marriage of young Tobias. These are not the actions of living icebergs. 

The doubt about the warmth of the angels, however, persists. We think a man or woman without feelings, as fishy-eyed as a gambler, has something missing, is somehow queer, inhuman. As a matter of fact, we are right: such people are queer, as queer as a man without a head, for something belonging to human nature is not there. Lack of emotion is not at all virtuous; it may be a misfortune, making a man a monstrosity; or it may well be a vice. For man has not only a soul, he also has a body; he is not only rational, he is also animal; he has an intellectual appetite, but he also has a sensitive appetite. The movement of that sense appetite towards sensible objects, coming from the imaginative picture of good or evil and involving a physical or corporal reaction, is ordinarily called emotion, feeling or passion. So, for example, an actress who throws herself into a part can actually produce the corporal changes that mark out the path along which the sense appetite is running — she can weep, blush, turn pale, tremble, gasp. 

These passions, amoral in themselves, are of immense value to man. By their help a man can muster up the courage to ask for a raise in salary, by the simple trick, for instance, of getting himself angry enough; the atmosphere of a church or a few minutes on our knees can awaken the will’s desire to pray. These passions, in a word, react on the intellectual appetite, spur it into action or, being deliberately aroused by the will, complete the circle and make the action of our will that much more intense. Using these passions of ours, the cunning of God not infrequently coaxes us into greater spiritual activity by doling out sensible sweetness and consolation to His children, coddling them a little or bestowing a pat of encouragement and reward. 

By reason of this intimate interaction between the will and the passions, these latter can also be an immense danger to a man. They can overwhelm the intellectual appetite and put a man at the mercy of the same motive power that dictates the actions of beasts; in opposition to the will they can terrify it into paralysis, weaken its action, cool its intensity to a vapid, lukewarm, nauseous thing. The men who succumb to the terror of persecution, the seduction of sin’s occasion, the respect of men, the despair of life are all living witnesses of the danger of passion out of control. On a milder scale, the steady death rate in good resolutions is eloquent testimony to the existence of a rival appetite which the will cannot regard lightly. 

The love of the angels 

Of course these sensible emotions are not in the angels. Angels have no bodies, so they can have no sense appetite, no imaginative pictures, no corporal reactions. But this does not mean they are cold, unloving and unlovable creatures. They have an intellectual appetite and its movement is as proportionately more perfect than ours as the angels themselves exceed us in perfection. That angelic appetite has also met with good and evil, with triumph and defeat. There is joy among the angels in heaven; and there is sorrow, hate and despair among the angels in hell. Some have desired great things and now delight in the possession of the objects of their desires; others have chosen rather the petty than the great and now are tormented by the possession of the objects of their desire. But these emotions of the angels are not physical movements of passion; they are something infinitely superior, something whose nature opens our eyes to some of the possibilities within ourselves — for we, too, have an intellectual appetite. 

Its nature: necessary and elective 

To understand something of those possibilities, and their limitations, we must see clearly the great difference between the knowledge and love of the angels and the knowledge and love proper to men. Quite naturally, and with no effort, we know some things perfectly; such things as that today is not yesterday, that we are not someone else, that happiness is the supreme value and so on. But we do not know all things naturally, easily, perfectly. Our love has the same split personality: some things we love naturally, necessarily; others we are free to embrace or reject, towards them we can be niggardly and cautious or recklessly generous. But the reason is not the same for this similar characteristic of our knowledge and our love. Our intellect sees valley after valley, but only after climbing the intervening hills; its imperfections are due precisely to the fact that it does have to climb hills and clamber down the other side. our will is like a woman who tries on hat after hat, finding none that does her justice; it grasps one after the other of the goods offered to its choice, not finding any one that includes all good, one that forces its choice on the will. 

Its objects 

The angels, too, love their own good, their own goal, their own perfection naturally and necessarily; they cannot help themselves any more than we can. As in us, the angels’ natural and necessary love is the spring from which proceeds that free, deliberate love of other things; because somehow, in some way, these things are bound up with their goal, their perfection, their happiness. Thus, loving themselves naturally and necessarily, they love the same qualities in other angels, just as we love — the common human characteristics of human nature in other men. We can dislike a man because he is mean, unjust, successful, generous or virtuous; but it is completely impossible for us to hate a man because he is a man, because he has a soul or a mind. The same is true of the angels. 

Its goal 

Like ourselves, the angels love God naturally and necessarily even more than they love themselves; for, loving their goal, their perfection, they are loving a similitude, an image of God. They are God’s, they belong to Him, as we do; naturally and necessarily they work back toward Him Who was their beginning. If they did not, there would exist a purely natural love in the angels that would be a perverted, twisted thing, loving to a greater degree something that was less lovable. Moreover, God Himself would be the author of this perverse love, as He is the author of nature; and this natural love would have to be destroyed by the supernatural love that was designed by God to perfect men and angels, the love that loves God above all things. Freely and with full choice, the angels love themselves, as we do; moreover, their love, like ours, extends to everything that is good. Their will, like our own, does not need to be coaxed out of doors; the only invitation necessary is a hint of goodness. 

In all this there is a great similarity between angels and men; that similarity must not lead us to make the mistake of identifying angelic and human activities in the fields of knowledge and love. The similarity in love comes from the objects of that love; the angelic love in itself is something to make us gasp. In contrast to it, our passions seem like tottering steps of an infant compared to the smooth, consuming stride of a runner. 

The love of the angels is not a spark slowly developing into a flame; it is an instantaneous bolt of lightning. The angel’s will moves as does its intellect, like a rapier thrust straight to the heart of goodness. This love does not last for a day or a year; it is a lightning bolt caught in mid-air in all its burning splendor — for an eternity. It cannot change, as ours does, by discovering unlovable characteristics in its loved one; it has all the knowledge from the start. An angel cannot fall in love with a face and then discover the face was false; it cannot become uninterested, disloyal, fluttering from one love to another. The angelic embrace cannot end. That love cannot be halfhearted, lukewarm, timid, cringing before obstacles. An angel does not fall into love; it plunges in with crushing force. This love is a drive not to be stopped by obstacles: it is a consuming fire devastatingly complete; it is a surrender that is eternally unconditional. It is the dream that is buried in every human heart, the closest approach to divine love in the created universe. Can an angel have joy, delight, sorrow, despair and hate? Ah yes; and to a degree that, like the divine, terrifies us. 

When God looked at the work of creation and found it good, He might well have been concentrating His gaze on the angels. From the first moment of their creation they possessed perfect natural happiness. Their intellects were perfect, their knowledge complete; their appetites, following in the footsteps of this perfect knowledge, were also perfect and in perfect possession of their natural goods from the very beginning. Indeed this work was good; even a divine artist could stand back from this masterpiece smiling that quiet smile of a master surveying his perfect work. The angels were perfect. 

But they were not perfect enough to satisfy the infinite generosity of God. There was still something that could be given to these creatures, a perfection above nature, a goal beyond the goal proper to angelic nature, a share in a life beyond the perfection of angelic life; they could still be raised to the height of supernatural happiness, to a share in the life of God, to an admission to the vision of God which is heaven. 

Such a goal of love is not to be lightly had. It must be earned, earned by personal efforts. Such efforts, even when put forth by a nature as perfect as the angelic nature, ate utterly worthless of themselves; this goal is above nature and nothing nature can offer serves as a ladder to reach that end. The angels, too, needed grace, faith, hope, charity; the tools, that is, with which to carve out an eternal life with God. The tools were given to them from the first instant of their creation; but the goal had to be won by a use of those tools. Even of the angels it is true that divine happiness is not forced upon them; if they would live forever with God, it must be through their free choice. 

The sin of the angels Possible sins 

This was the trial of the angels — the choice between life with God or without Him. This was their term of probation, their opportunity to make a success or a failure of their lives. The issue was soon decided, for the angelic choice moves with swift directness to its object never to relinquish it. The choice was made irrevocably, eternally. By one good act the angels merited heaven — some of them; and the issue of heaven or hell was closed forever as far as they were concerned. 

The victorious angels, as they stepped into heaven, brought with them the fullness of their natural knowledge, losing nothing on the way. From that time on they were eternally incapable of sinning, not merely because of the unchangeable nature of their love, but because any appetite in possession of the infinite good is not to be lured away from that adequately satisfying lover by the fetching smiles of anything else. Nothing can be more attractive; everything else is only a participation, a mirroring of the beauties of that infinite goodness. This was the end of the angels, the final halt of the march to goodness and truth, the end of the road. From here on, what progress was made would be purely secondary, accidental, as inconsequential as a flower slipped into the lapel of a coat, and as absurdly pleasing as a totally unnecessary testimony of divine thoughtfulness. 

The actual sin 

It was a long road the angels travelled in an incredibly short time. In fact, it was much too long for some of the angels; not all reached the end of it. There is not only love in the angels, not only the sublime perfection of that love in its elevation to the supernatural plane; there is also the abuse of love which is sin. At first sight, it is difficult to see how an angel could sin. A man can stumble into sin when ignorance makes his vision defective; but there is no defect in the angel’s knowledge, An angel cannot be rushed into sin by a storm of passion, for it has no passions. There can be no question in the angels of the long, bitter discouraging battle against habit that a drunkard faces; for bad habits were certainly not infused by God and there were no preceding acts by which such habits could be built up. This was the angels’ first sin. 

In a very real sense, it was difficult for the angels to sin. So difficult, in fact, that to the mind of St. Thomas (though not all theologians agree with him) it was completely impossible for the angels to sin in the purely natural order. The immediate, intrinsic and natural rule of morality for them was their own intellects; these were perfect and were perfectly followed by the will of the angels. If they had not been lifted to the supernatural order, they could not have sinned, could not have gone to hell; but then neither could they have gone to heaven. There would have been no angelic sinners; nor would there have been any angelic saints. That has always been the risk of the high goals; the low, level places are safer, so safe indeed as to be worthless. It has always been dangerous to make “reckless leaps into darkness with hands outstretched to a star.” 

Its object 

Even in the supernatural order, an angelic sin it a difficult business. Even there, no imperfection is possible in the angels preceding sin: no darkening of the intellect, no absence of knowledge, no refusal of the will to follow the intellect; the angels could not choose evil, thinking it good. But they could choose good evilly. True, that statement throws no glaring light on the mystery of the angels’ sin; but the truth that does dispel some of the darkness is wrapped up tightly in that brief statement. For while it is true that there could be no imperfection in the angels before sin, it is equally true that imperfection before sin was not necessary in order that the angels should turn away from God. 

In treating of angelic knowledge, we saw that the angel received its full consignment of concepts at the very first moment of its life; but an angel, like a man, can consider only one concept at a time. What concept is considered at this precise moment is a matter to be decided entirely at the taste of the particular angel. It can consider this one, or that one, or none at all. In this precise power lies the key to the solution of the mysterious sin of the angels. In the concrete, it is not difficult to determine what sin the angels committed. They really had no such dazzling variety of evil as is displayed before the human tentative purchaser of evil. Only two sins were open to the angels, for only two sins directly appeal to spiritual nature: the sins of pride and envy. Moreover, envy could come about only as a consequent of pride. Concretely, then, the angelic sin could be no other than a sin of pride. How did that particular sin actually come about? 

We have a rather accurate picture of the process if we can imagine the glamor girl of the year, looking her very best as she prepares to step out of her room, stopping, as she naturally would, for one last approving glance — and standing transfixed by her own beauty. So the angels, considering their own beauty and perfection, were enchanted. There they stopped, captivated refusing to let their minds consider the further supernatural end to which that lustrous natural beauty was ordered. In this sense they wished to be like God — nothing could be more beautiful, nothing more perfect, they would be sufficient to themselves, placing their happiness, their final end, in themselves to the scorn of the supernatural happiness which was the beatific vision. The splendor of the angelic beauty fascinated them: they refused to look beyond it to the infinite splendor of the vision of God. 

The glamor girl’s rapt admiration of herself could hardly be morally serious. Certainly it would not be an eternal choice; eventually her ankles would get tired or her stomach would demand some food. But in the angels, this fascination was a deliberate mortal sin. 

It was mortal for it involved turning away from God, rejecting the final end for the created good which was the angelic nature. Moreover, it was sinful. True, it is no imperfection in the angels not to consider this or that idea, generally speaking; just as it is no sin in a Catholic to refuse to wonder what day of the week this happens to be, But if the Catholic fears this may be Friday, and be refuses to wonder about it lest he discover that he must subsist that day on the hated fish, he sins. So, too, with the angels; faith them, it is an imperfection and a sin not to consider this or that idea when they are obliged to consider it. The whole thing was deliberate, that is free and finder control. Surely the consideration of their own beauty and the embrace of that beauty was entirely voluntary; nor was the refusal to consider the vision of God, or the lack of all such consideration, a forced, necessary thing. In the angels, as in us, the mind turns to this or that subject of consideration as we wish it to; the euphemistic phrase, “a wandering mind,” carries with it the pleasantly flattering, but completely false, implication that our mind is busy at one thing or another all the time. our imagination wanders, but our minds work at the task we assign them. In the angels, that is even more true. In this case, then, the angels directly and expressly willed the consideration of their own beauty; the lack of consideration of the vision of God was willed indirectly and implicitly. They put themselves in the position of a man who refuses to listen to his own faults and limitations because he is so heartily in love with himself. 

It seems clear that this sin demanded no imperfection in the angels before the sin. This lack of consideration of the final end was not before the sin, it was a part of the sin. The sin began in this inconsideration and was consummated in the evil choice of themselves made by the angels. To put the whole thing in strict theological language, thereby showing mathematicians that they are not alone in their esoteric terminology, we could say that the inconsideration of the final end was first in the order of formal cause, since the judgment of reason is the rule of choice; but in the order of efficient and final cause, the angel’s evil choice of themselves was first since the free will moves the intellect to act. 

The angels’ sin was a rebellion, a wild, hopeless, stupid rebellion. But it did have a splendid leader. Lucifer, who headed the rebellious hosts, was, in the natural order, the greatest of all the angels, good or bad. In other words, the most perfect nature that God has ever produced was the first to rebel against Him. Any of the other angels had only to look a step above to see a creature more beautiful than himself; but there were no creatures more beautiful than Lucifer. He was the most perfect image of the splendor of God; to realize he was only an image, he would have to look to God Himself. Pride was the sin of the angels, not weakness, ignorance or passion; and surely the greatest of the angels had the most reason for pride. 

In the angelic world, the defection of Lucifer had a considerably greater effect than would the apostasy of a Pope in Christendom. He did not drag any of his fellows to hell with him by the scruff of their necks; but by way of example, suggestion or even, perhaps, persuasion he mustered quite an army. Scripture gives us an indication of this by declaring that all the devils are subject to Lucifer; according to St. Peter, speaking of sin, “by whom a man is overcome, of the same also is he a slave.” It would seem to be the order of divine justice, that we are subject in punishment to him to whose suggestion we have consented in sin; him whom we choose as a leader in evil we shall have for a master in punishment. 

Number of angelic sinners 

To assign a number to the legions of revolting angels is, of course, sheer guesswork. No tally sheet of the devils has been given us and there is no other way in which we could know how many followed Lucifer. Since, however, sin, of its very nature, is against intelligence and a violation of natural inclinations, it would be rash indeed to suppose that, in a nature so perfect it allowed for no mistakes, the majority fell into sin. It is much more probable that not as many of the angels sinned as conquered. 

At any rate, these sinful angels, forever after known as devils, had committed supernatural suicide. They were, from then on, supernaturally dead, as helpless to climb back to the heights of the supernatural as a dead man is to scramble out of his grave. They had thrown away that participation of divine life which is sanctifying grace and were, henceforth, incapable of producing any work worthy of heaven. Their intellects were stripped of all that supernatural affective knowledge, such as would produce love; the gift of wisdom had been tossed aside; and the speculative intellectual knowledge that might have come to them by future revelations was cut down to a dim, vague light. Indeed, from then on they would receive only such knowledge as was necessary for the working out of the divine plans; even such knowledge would be, for them, a suspect, torturing, uncertain thing stripped of the infallible certitude that comes from the supernatural virtue of faith. 

For all that, they were a splendid lot as they trooped from heaven. Sin, of itself, does not destroy the integrity of nature as rebellion destroys the integrity of an empire; and theirs was a splendid nature. Their intellects retained the full perfection of natural knowledge, the complete freedom from the impediments of ignorance and passion. Their wills were still the splendid instrument of desire which recognized no impediment to its attainment and no solvent of its embrace. But these splendid wills were forever confirmed in sin. The devils had no opportunity to repent, no second chance to remedy an initial mistake. In the first place, such a second chance depended, in them as in us, on the purely free gift of divine grace; of themselves they were helpless. But over and above that supernatural helplessness, repentance is naturally impossible to the angels. An angel cannot turn back. The act of its will, like that of its intellect, is one swift, eternally enduring act. Whether it be to good or to bad, the angel must stand forever committed to its first choice, eternally loyal even though that loyalty be to the standards of hell. 

The punishment of the sin 

Such inescapable loyalty brings no joy to the devils. There is sorrow in hell, penetrating, despairing sorrow proportionate to the great joy of which the brilliant wills of the devils were capable. Their wills can and do resist the things that are in place of the things that might have been; the salvation of souls, the joy of the blessed, their own misery in hell are constant sources of unceasing sorrow. In fact, if this sorrow were not in the devils, it would be absurd to speak of their punishment, for punishment means, essentially, something against the will, something undergone with regret. But, of course, there is no physical pain, no passion of sorrow in the devils; horns, tails, pitchforks and leering grins are no part of the diabolic equipment. These are, after all, angels; and angels are purely spiritual beings. 

The instant their sin was committed, the devils were hurled into hell, the place of their eternal punishment. Evidently the fires prepared for them there could not physically torture them; a spiritual nature cannot be made to sizzle over a fire. Yet this fire can, supernaturally, be a real punishment; if, for example, it was endowed with the supernatural power of limiting the activity of a spiritual nature (as Thomas thought), it would place the particular devil in somewhat the same humiliating position of a strong adult confined in a baby’s play-pen. From time to time, some devils are allowed to wander the world for the exercise of human virtue, itself a humiliating and infuriating occupation; though there are some who have never been outside the gates of hell, as there are angels who have never left heaven. Whether in hell or on this earth, every devil carries the essence of hell with him — the despairing knowledge that all is lost forever. It may be that the fire of hell accompanies these wandering devils to humiliate their proud power, or perhaps it is only the humiliating thought, that they must return to that infantile enclosure which is forever in their minds. 

Conclusion Human nature seen in the light of angelic saints and sinners 

This is the field of angelic love: the stupendous natural beauty and power of it, the heights to which it climbed and the depths to which it plunged; ringing through every instant of it is that mysterious, somehow terrifying note of forever, of eternity. This is the race to which we are kin. This is the love upon which ours is modelled; for we, too, have an intellectual appetite, a will capable of these heights, of these depths, and for an eternity. 

Potentialities for good 

Because of that will of ours, we too can attain to the beauty of that angelic vision that was too much for the pride of the angels, so dazzling is it; we can go this far and further, to the heights which some of the angels did not climb to the vision of the eternal splendor, the life of God Himself. Our love, too, is capable of just such loyalty, plot such wholehearted surrender. In fact, it is only in proportion to our approach to this love of a spiritual nature that we are worthy of our own immortal souls. This is the love that can and must dominate the emotions, the passions, that we have in common with the animals. This is the love that is betrayed by the emotionalism of our day. For, in a sense, we can go down a bit lower than the angels we can not only lose God, we can do what the greatest devil cannot, we can give full rein to emotion and put ourselves on a level with the beasts. 

Consequences in men of angelic virtue and sin

Humility 

Familiarity with this love of the angels, giving, as it does, a knowledge of our unsounded potentialities for good and evil, is a source of virtues that are strangers to a world of emotion. For it brings a man face to face with the truth about himself. In the face of that truth he may well be humble. Emotion, uncontrolled passion, is not humble but greedy, self-centered and, strangely, satisfied only with its own destruction. It is good to realize, when we stride along .n the pride of life, conscious of our strength and bolstered up, perhaps, by a long escape from sin, that the greatest of the angels fell. It is a distinct deterrent to the rash inclination to flirt with the occasion of sin to know that, without such obstacles as the passions present to reason and will, the most perfect nature God ever made was plunged into hell. 

Fear 

Knowing the truth of himself and the angels, a man might well cultivate a healthy fear. For indeed devils are not mere myths. They are terrible realities; they are enemies with natures intact in their superiority and perfection, on fire with a hatred of God and all that smacks of God. Their very hate drives them on to focus their splendid intelligence on the destruction of God’s kingdom on earth, His friendship in our hearts and our eternal life with Him. Our salvation may well be worked out in fear and trembling. 

Self-respect 

Yet the truth about himself makes no snivelling coward of a man. We are of the race of the angels. Our lives, our love are not mere biological accidents, individually of no importance. Like that of the angels, our life and our love can escape corruption, dimming of activity, the rusty wearing down and weary creaking of a last moment of life. We are above the common, the ordinary, the ephemeral; we are of a long line of spiritual nobility. Our name is one to be kept honorable; for, like the angels, we must live with that name forever.

CHAPTER XII — THE KINGDOM OF MAN
(Q. 65-74; 90-93)

1. Scriptural account of the kingdom of man:

    (a) Modern rejection of the story.

    (b) The two elements of the story:

               (1) The fact of creation.

               (2) Account of the distinction and adornment of the universe.

2. Unreasonable rejection of the fact of creation:

    (a) Résumé of proof of creation.

    (b) Different senses of the word “evolution:”

               (1) A scientific hypothesis.

               (2) A pseudo-scientific solvent on a universal scale.

               (3) A philosophical explanation of the universe.

    (c) Interrelation of creation and evolution.

3. Unjust rejection of the account of distinction and adornment:

    (a) The purpose of the account.

    (b) The language of it.

    (c) Injustice of its rejection.

4. Origin of the kingdom of man:

    (a) Thomas’ approach to the question:

               (1) His three principles.

               (2) His chief interest.

               (3) The science of his time.

    (b) Causes of the kingdom of man.

    (c) The work of distinction — the first three days.

    (d) The work of adornment — the last three days.

    (e) The rest of God — the seventh day.

5. Origin of the lord of the world:

    (a) His soul.

    (b) His body.

    (c) His partner:

               (1) Time and manner of the production of woman.

               (2) Her relation to man.

Conclusion:

1. Pertinence of the question of the origin of the world:

    (a) To the mind of man.

    (b) To the life of man.

2. Contrast of the answers:

    (a) From the appraisal of reason.

    (b) From the consequences of each.

CHAPTER XII THE KINGDOM OF MAN (Q.65-74;90-93)

Scriptural account of the kingdom of man

Modern rejection of the story

Such amused tolerance is the product of a sense of immense superiority, superiority so great as to make it unnecessary to bother about details. In any field, such superiority is dangerous: it is the sort of thing that topples an experienced lineman from a telephone pole, that makes a drunkard challenge the world. Superiority is a heady drink to be sipped, not gulped; however enticing its bouquet, clear its color and warming its taste, it too easily brings on early morning regrets. Perhaps our moderns are only gay, not really drunk, though they have proved steady drinkers of this dangerous drink; they have not yet reached the morning-after stage, but they have been careless, they have laid the bases for the groans of regret.

The two elements of the story: The fact of creation.

Account of the distinction and adornment of the universe.

Along with the story of the world’s distinction and adornment, they have, extravagantly, carelessly, blindly, thrown out a momentous fact, the fact of the origin of the world. They have tossed the whole thing out like an old rag doll. Perhaps nothing stamps Thomas as so completely out of date, in the eyes of the moderns, as the fact that he took this story seriously: Surely, nothing so clearly marks him off from modern thinkers as the fact that he saw the two elements in this story: the momentous fact of creation and the simple account of the distinction and adornment of the world. His intellect bowed before the first of these, as an unimpeded intellect must always do homage to solid truth, and he could mete out justice to the second because of his firm grasp of the first.

IN THE Book of Genesis there is an account of the beginnings of the world that has amused the scholars of our age. In fact, their amusement was so huge that they shared the joke with the man in the street. The story was pleasant enough in its way: hardly plausible, still it was taken seriously by millions of men before the clear light of science exposed it for what it was: a myth among many similar myths. In that bright light, it looks as ridiculous as an actor caught in broad daylight with his make-up on.

Unreasonable rejection of the fact of creation

Rejection of the fact of creation is unreasonable, not in the sense a man is unreasonable because he is slightly pig-headed or extremely meticulous. This rejection is unreasonable because it is an open flaunting of reason.

Résumé of proof of creation.

In a former chapter we have treated the matter of creation quite thoroughly, insisting that the world was brought into existence by a first cause creating it. However, a brief restatement of that reasoning will not be out of place here. A first cause means no more than an utterly independent cause; that is, a cause that has nothing or no one before it, that is in every sense first. To be independent in this full sense of the word means to be completely self sufficient as well as to be the first source of all else. Creation is commonly defined as “making something out of nothing”; more profoundly, it is the production of something independently of any pre-existing subject. In a word, it is the production of the whole being not merely a part of it, not disposing for it, or bringing it forth from something else. So that creation, the truth so eminently clear to reason and so solidly taught by faith, means simply that the world was produced by the first cause in the way proper to that first cause, that is, with complete independence. If we postulate anything on which this first cause depends, we are simply denying that this is a first cause and we push the problem just that much further back; we do not solve it. For it will always remain true, that where we discover someone leaning, depending, there will be something to lean on, to depend on; and the stability of this latter will not be the product of the feeble one who drapes himself on it. Complete independence in act means the production of the effect from nothing.

The reasons given for this explanation of the universe are those given for the existence of God. They can be put briefly by saying that either this was the way things were produced or there are no things — which last is evidently false. There is no other way to account, not only for the universe, but for the very least thing in it. The question here is not merely of mountains, continents and planets; but of even a speck of dust or the wink of an eye. one cries out the existence of the first cause as loudly as the other, or of all together. An endless chain of dependent causes does not explain any one of them or all of them, for their very dependence precludes the possibility of their being self-sufficient, the source or the first; that dependence demands something upon which to depend. Either there is an independent or first cause, or there are no effects; either that first cause created, if it acted at all, or it is not first. The fact of creation, with its strict adherence to the facts of the world, is not something a man needs to feel self-conscious about or to apologize for. Rather, it is something demanded in the name of all that is reasonable.

Different senses of the word “evolution“

Reasonable or not, this fact of creation has been swept out of men’s minds along with the rest of the account given in Genesis. But the house need not be left empty; in place of creation we can have evolution, either all at once or on an installment plan that eases the pain of its acceptance by spreading the burden over millions of years. Lest such a statement bring on, with the promptness of an echo, the charge that we are anti-scientific, ultra-conservative or behind the times, let us investigate the meaning of the world “evolution.”

Such an investigation is important for the word designates a strange set of triplets; one or the other may enjoy the confusion of a stranger who cannot distinguish them, but each will indignantly resent having the faults of one of the others attributed to her, especially the faults of the weak sister of the three.

A scientific hypothesis

Most properly, the word is taken to refer to a scientific hypothesis. As such it was, and is, advanced as a scientific record of the development of life. As a scientific hypothesis, and within its own field, it has immense value. The mass of cumulative evidence supporting it certainly classifies it as a first class working theory; and this is all the scientist seeks. It is not, nor is it in this sense intended to be, a final explanation of the universe. The object of science is not an explanation but the uncovering of a universal; it does not seek the last cause, but a general law; its reasoning does not terminate in conclusions or explanations, but rather in the generalizations which are called scientific laws.

In this proper sense, no philosopher or theologian can have any objection to it. To contrast an adherent of the creation explanation and an evolutionist in this sense is as silly as it would be to consider as mutually exclusive terms the words “democrat” and “nordic.” The only possible source of conflict here would be the extension of this scientific working hypothesis to the origin of the human soul. That would be stepping outside the field of science immediately, for it would be to step outside the field of experimental observation; moreover, it is a step not taken by the scientist.

A pseudo-scientific solvent on a universal scale

The word “evolution” is also widely used for a pseudo-scientific theory that is in the nature of a patent medicine to remedy all intellectual ills by resolving all difficulties. It is considered applicable to nearly all fields and is actually wielded with the recklessness that formerly characterized the use of arnica or camphor. It is, for example applied to comparative religion and adduced as the explanation of the present existence of monotheism; to sociology and hailed as the explanation of the alleged development of monogamy from promiscuity; to ethics as the explanation of Christian ethics developing from a completely amoral condition — and so on and on and on.

This approaches the ridiculous. If a man concludes, from the fact that the theory of relativity works beautifully in mathematics and explains many phenomena in physics, that everything is relative, he might, at any moment, logically start to use a pair of shoes for a handkerchief. These pseudo-scientific statements are quite groundless from a purely scientific point of view. As a matter of fact, the evidence shows no development of monotheism from polytheism or atheism; there is much more evidence for the conclusion that monotheism was the primitive form. A promiscuous society has yet to be discovered; and again the evidence of anthropology, insofar as it allows of a conclusion, points to monogamy as the primitive form of marriage. An amoral condition of men is a modern nightmare, not a scientific fact; some of the most surely primitive peoples we have yet discovered hold a high moral code and practise it. These things are flatly unscientific; yet they are solemnly advanced day after day, in publication after publication as though no scientific discoveries had been made since first the theorists started their castle building untrammeled by the brick and mortar of evidence.

For these things, there need be no sympathy whatever. They are without justification. They have none of the beauty of a fairy tale, the utilitarian efficient of a swindler’s story, the venerable dignity of a myth, the plausibility of a lie or the humor of a whopping joke. Least of all have they any of the characteristics of a fact. They have only the ugly repulsiveness of intellectual degeneracy.

A philosophical explanation of the universe

In its third sense, “evolution” is seriously advanced as a philosophic answer to the question of the origin of the world. This philosophic theory, which denies causality and finality, assumes that the process of change is a self-sufficient explanation both of itself and of the perfection of the universe. One form of this explanation declares that the story reads like this: some primary stuff — very imperfect — eternal or mysteriously coming into existence of itself, has slowly developed, thanks to chance and environment, with the force of inexorable law into the complicated world as we know it today. A scientist would have a graphic picture of all this if, in the vacuum he has created, there should suddenly appear a puff of smoke fragrant of a blend of Virginia and Turkish tobacco; and then, under his astonished eyes, the smoke took form, developing into a perfect ring slowly floating off (without air to float on) and, as a last delicate touch, sporting just the suspicion of a bit of lipstick to support the illusion that there had been a smoker’s mouth and a cigarette in back of the whole thing.

Another form of this explanation pictures a mysterious life force, again utterly imperfect, necessarily surging its way up through matter (which is unexplained and, indeed, not a reality at all) into the perfections we know today. In this opinion there is no material world, for only the process of change is real and that does not stop long enough for it to be recognized, let alone given a name. The words seem obscure, but the idea becomes perfectly clear when you picture the change of expression from joy to sorrow on a man’s face, first blotting out the joy, the sorrow, the face and the expression. Both these forms of the philosophic explanation called by the name of evolution are extended to include man, body and soul. Both deny the idea of a cause, or a starting point, outside the process of change. And both necessarily deny an intelligent finality to the whole affair.

Interrelation of creation and evolution

All three of these senses of evolution — the scientific, the pseudo-scientific and the philosophical — must be seen in relation to creation if there is to be any dissipation of the confusion that has come from using the one word in three distinctly different senses. Quite evidently there is no possibility of conflict between evolution as a scientific hypothesis and the fact of creation. Creation is explicitly a statement of the last cause, the ultimate explanation of the universe; and, just as explicitly, science is not interested in last cause or ultimate explanations but only in the uncovering of general laws. Science has no professional interest in the source of these laws or in the nature of the law-giver, or, indeed, in the very existence of such a legislator.

In the sense of a pseudo-scientific theory, there is no possibility of honest conflict between evolution and creation, or indeed between evolution and anything else, any more than there is a possibility of the babbling of a child clashing with some eternal truth. This theory is a positive insult to human intelligence; the audacity of its proposal assumes that we know nothing of the actual state of science, that we have heard nothing of the findings of science for the last twenty years.

In the sense of a philosophic explanation of the origin of the universe, evolution dashes head on with the act of creation — and it is just too bad for evolution if reason be the witness of the accident, or even the undertaker. In this sense, evolution is nothing more than the process of change on a grand scale, the change from potentiality to actuality, the realization of potentialities. To use some examples from an earlier chapter, it is the becoming of the statue from a marble block, the becoming of the surgeon from the butcher, the becoming of the masterpiece from the paints and canvas. To claim self-sufficiency for such a process, to posit it without explanation and blandly declare that it explains itself and everything else, is contrary to reason, unintelligible and so patently false.

Let us look at it a bit more closely. It is frankly a denial of the principle of causality and finality, that is, it makes the world a lustry brat that was unborn but is growing, a play unfolding without beginning or end, a book without starting point, plot or finish, a motion that not only did not start and is not going anywhere but which has absolutely nowhere to go. This denial is reducible to the contradiction which is an identification of opposites and it brings the mind up sharply against a dilemma. Either there is no difference between the potentiality and the actuality, between the canvas and the masterpiece, for the potentiality is the producer of the actuality by the mere process of change, by merely moving itself, of itself, to that perfection; and this amounts to a denial of evolution itself for it is a denial of change. Or, the other horn of the dilemma, this latest perfection produced by evolution is not the same as the potentiality from which it developed; in this case, it came from nothing of itself. This gives us something from nothing with no other cause adduced; more simply, it staggers the mind with the incredible contradiction that nothing is something.

This may seem much too brutal a simplification of evolution, since nothing has been said of the million of years involved, the power of the process of change, environment and chance. In a sense, the charge is just; this is a simplification of evolution. It has disregarded the table decorations, the hors d’oeuvres and the liqueurs to concentrate on the meat and potatoes of the meal. But, as a matter of fact, millions of years do not help or hinder the problem; time has nothing to do with the central difficulty, it is merely a measure of the method of development not the explanation of that development. The process of change is merely a statement of the method of development, of how the change was brought about: it is not an explanation, not a statement of cause, it does not tell us why there is a world at all.

But then look at the part environment plays in the scheme; and necessity; and chance! Well, look at them. What produced the environments? What is the source of the necessity? What is chance, in this case, but the mathematician’s “x”, a statement of a common factor. The whole thing has been succinctly put in these words: “When there is change, there is reason for change — and the reason for change can be found only in something not involved in that change. It follows that if there is such a thing as a process of change with a definite and discoverable law which embraces the whole of physical reality, the whole physical reality must have a non-physical environment.” For change and evolution presuppose the environment and the environed interacting on one another.

Unjust rejection of the account of distinction and adornment of the universe

The purpose of the account

The rejection of the fact of creation is a violation of the reason of man; it is unreasonable in the sense of being mad. The rejection, on scientific grounds, of the Scriptural account of the distinction and adornment of the world has a petty meanness about it for it is definitely unfair. The purpose of Moses in writing the account given in Genesis was to instruct an unlettered people in the fundamental truths of the religious and moral order. He wrote that they might know the obligation of adoration and gratitude to Jehovah, the author, governor and conserver of all things; that he might preserve his people from idolatry in recalling to them that every Creature has its reason of existence in a superior cause, that every creature is destined to serve man, the Crown and masterpiece of creation, and not to be served by man.

The language of it

Moses did his work in masterly fashion. His language is necessarily one of great simplicity; but its grand figures speak vividly to the imagination, it pictures the sweeping lines of the universe in terms that slam against the senses. In fact, the account often approaches the grandeur and rhythm of sublime poetry.

A hundred and fifty years ago men were smiling at the tale of Moses because it said nothing of the nebular theory of the generation of thee planets, the physics of Newton or the optical theories of Descartes. Today the smile comes again because there is nothing there of relativity, no statement of the principles of thermodynamics or of evolution. A hundred and fifty years from now another generation will continue to enjoy the huge joke of Moses not stating the scientific theories of that future time. In other words, the account is rejected primarily because Moses was not a bungler, because he did not fill a lesson in religious and moral truths with a scientific jargon that would meet the approval of all ages.

Of course it is vain to look for chemical formulas or mathematical statements in this account; there is no display of geological evidence and no anticipation of biological discoveries to be found in it. It was never intended as a scientific account; if it had been, it would have completely failed of its purpose, leaving the Hebrews of the desert glassy-eyed and slack-jawed in astonishment. It is unjust to look for contradictions to modern science in an account that was avowedly non-scientific. The very nature and language of the account made it so evidently elastic that the earliest Christian commentators could find hardly a word that was not open to widely different interpretations in the factual field: thus “day” might have meant twenty-four hours, many such days, an indefinite period of time or even a stage in knowledge; the creation of plants might have meant the instant establishment of perfect species or only the establishing of these species in germ for development; light, firmament, earth and many another word were seen, from the beginning, to be of this same indefinite character.

Injustice of its rejection

Briefly, the account of Moses is an account that admirably serves its purpose, and that does not serve a purpose foreign to it. It is unjust to tie it down to the science of any one time; and unjust to cite it as contradicting the science of any one time. It can and does oppose pseudo-scientific theories that are at bottom philosophical, for it is avowedly expository of the philosophical truths that are at the roots of all being.

Origin of the kingdom of man: Thomas’ approach to the question:

His three principles.

St. Thomas, approaching the account of creation from the vantage point of his faith, laid down some common sense principles. To him it was obvious that the truth of Holy Scripture must be held inviolate; after all, it is the inspired word of God and so there is nothing of truth which can be more sure. It also seemed clear to him that when it is possible to expose the Scriptures in many ways, no one position or interpretation should be 50 narrowly held to that, if it be certainly established that such a position be false, a man would nevertheless presume to maintain it. Such a man would justly be held in derision by the infidels and so block the infidels’ way to belief. Thomas saw the necessity of remembering that Moses spoke to an unlettered people; condescending to their ignorance (imbecillitas is the word Thomas uses) he proposed only those things that were manifestly apparent to the senses. After all, man did not lose the knowledge of natural things by his sin, nor that science by which the necessities of the flesh are provided. In Scripture, then, man is not taught these things, but rather the science of the soul, which science he had lost by his sin.

His chief interest

Thomas, in other words, makes it plain at the beginning that he is not approaching this account in search of scientific explanations. His interest, as a theologian, was centered on the metaphysical truths which that account avowedly advanced for the Hebrews: creation as a fact and as an act proper to God; the first cause of all things: and the final cause of the world. Thomas was not particularly interested, then, in this account as scientific; nevertheless, in exposing it, he was obliged to make use of contemporary science, as we are today. Thomas knew the science of his time well; in this treatment he did not try to investigate that science, to improve it or criticise it. He merely used it.

The science of his time

To understand his exposition of the account of Genesis, it will be necessary to have at least a nodding acquaintance with the physics of Aristotle which was the science of the thirteenth century. To the minds of the men of that time, the universe was made up of seven concentric planetary spheres contained within an eighths the sphere of the fixed stars, containing in their turn the earth as a center. Above the heaven of the fixed stars began the invisible world, that is, the crystalline heaven, or heaven of the waters, which was the source of rain and the Empyrean heaven, or the heaven of light, which was the abode of the angels. The matter of these celestial spheres was strictly incorruptible because their forms completely exhausted the potentialities of the matter. To each sphere a moving intelligence was assigned; its work being to direct the circular motion of the particular sphere, not to inform it or vivify it as a soul vivifies a body. Below the lowest sphere, that of the moon, are arranged the spheres of the four elements, namely, fire, air, water and earth. By rights, each of these should be gathered up in a natural site with a resultant perfect equilibrium; but, in fact, they are intermingled. Since their natural tendency is to strive for their natural site, there results the distinctive movements of the elements, thus fire goes up, earth goes down.

Causes of the kingdom of man

With these ideas in mind, we already have a fair notion of Thomas’ treatment of the account of creation. The first efficient cause was, of course, God, for Thomas had none of the modern madness about him. God is also the final cause or the end of the universe. The eternal ideas in the mind of God are the formal cause in the sense of exemplary cause. And, since all things come from God, both the matter of things and their intrinsic forms are from God, existing, of course, only in conjunction as composites.

The work of distinction — the first three days

The act of creation was an eternal act of God. As to the unfolding of that eternal act in time, these were two phases: one of distinction and one of adornment. The first three days of creation were occupied with the work of distinction, for obviously there can be no adornment until there is something to adorn. The first day saw the distinction of light and darkness; the second day brought the distinction of heaven and earth, the firmament dividing against the waters; on the third day the waters of the earth were gathered into seas, dividing seas from dry land. The land carried its quota of plants as a man wears his clothes, for the plants were not so much an ornament as an ordinary and decent covering for the bare earth.

The work of adornment — the last three days

The last three days were filled with the pleasantly creative labor of decoration, God appearing as the interior decorator of the universe facing a crucial test of His divine good taste. Thus, on the fourth day He concentrated on the heavens, adorning them with the sun, moon and stars; on the fifth day the waters received their bewilderingly various adornment of fishes, the air its fragmentary beauty of birds; the sixth day was dedicated to the adornment of the earth with its animals, among which was man. But he is so important that his production deserves, and gets, special treatment.

Throughout this exposition, Thomas is content to coast along, explaining the natures of the different products in terms of the science of his time, signalling the great differences in the interpretations of the Fathers, assigning reasons for the precise order in which these things were produced. Some of these reasons are penetrating and humanly interesting to an extreme, the reasons, for example, for the production of the stars. Every corporal creature has three ends: itself, a nature above it, and the universe. Moses, in accounting for the stars, considers only the second, the utility of man: the stars serve man by giving light for the direction of work and the acquisition of knowledge; by furnishing a change of seasons to destroy the ennui of an unchanging climate, to conserve health and to allow the necessary food to be raised — things that could not happen in an eternal winter or an eternal summer; by furnishing opportunities for business and work by allowing the forecasting of dry and rainy seasons.

The rest of God — the seventh day

By the end of the sixth day, creation was over and done with. Everything that was ever to exist was made by that time, either actually or virtually, that is, in its full perfection or potentially, in germ; as for human souls, they existed at least in their exemplar, in the mind of God. Creation was an accomplished fact; God then rested. But the rest of God by no means implies that God’s action in the world ceased on the sixth day, there was no question of a Florida trip or an ocean voyage on a divine scale to get away from it all. He operates unceasingly in conserving and governing the world. The seventh day, marking the repose of God in this sense, is fittingly kept holy; for the sanctification of everything consists precisely in its reposing in God as God did in Himself on the seventh day.

Origin of the lord of the world

To come to the creation of man, we find him destined to occupy a peculiar position linking the material and spiritual world in himself; consequently, it is necessary to consider the element of the spiritual and that of the material in him separately. Really, the spiritual offers no rational difficulty, though it has been the stumbling block of intellectuals for hundreds of years; but then what could be more fitting than that a professed intellectual should stumble over a block that was not there.

His soul

It is immediately evident, and also a doctrine of faith, that the soul of Adam was certainly not an emanation of the substance of God, an outpouring of the divine stuff. From what has already been said of the infinite perfection and ceaseless act of God and what is quite evident of the limitation and imperfection of our own souls, there can be no question of identity of the two. The soul of Adam must, then, have been produced; and there is only one way to produce a spiritual substance, that is, by creation It cannot be knitted, woven, grown or manufactured. It cannot be made from any material stuff; the attempt to maintain that it can promptly involves the contradiction that the soul is both spiritual and possessed of parts. Nor can it have been made from any preexisting spiritual substance; such a substance, precisely as spiritual, is devoid of parts and thus cannot have anything taken from it without being destroyed. The soul of man is created; and that means that it was produced immediately by God, for the utterly independent mode of action which is creation is proper to the only utterly independent agent. Even though the angels were willing to take on a little extra work, God Himself could give them no part in this labor which is possible only to omnipotent power. It is the common teaching of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church that the human soul was not produced before the human body, though philosophically there is no impossibility involved in such a previous production. But then, neither is there any reason to be found for such a previous existence. Certainly, if Augustine is right and the body was only virtually produced during the six days of creation, there is no reason why the soul must necessarily have come into actual existence in that period.

It is plain, then, that on the question of the soul of man both faith and reason stand diametrically opposed to the theories of complete evolution. Because the human soul is spiritual, it can come only from God and must come directly from Him. There can be no question of its slow development, or, indeed, of any development of it; not only because there is nothing from which a spiritual substance can be developed, but also because, being devoid of parts, the soul is had all at once or it is not had at all. In any question of the evolution of man, if we are to stand on reasonable grounds, his soul must be excluded from the discussion; otherwise we place him on the level of material creation in violation of the evident fact that his acts exceed the limits of the material.

His body

In the production of the body of man, St. Thomas says no one element (fire, air, earth, or water) was exclusively used. As God had all things eminently in Himself, as the angels had all things intentionally (that is, by knowledge) in themselves, so man was a kind of microcosmos, having almost everything in his composition: spirituality in his soul, a likeness of the heavenly bodies in the stability of his make-up, and the earthly elements in his physical constitution. The question of the production of the body of man was really a question of disposing the material for the fit reception of the human soul.

Certainly that disposition could not have been accomplished by other human beings, as it is today; there were no others. Nor could it have been, naturally, the work of some other animals any more than a pair of tigers, let alone a pair of mountains, can dispose the material for the generation of a mouse. It was the work of God: perhaps immediately, by the direct divine formation of the body; perhaps mediately, that is, through lower animals to which such poster had been specially given or, as Augustine would have it, the body was only virtually produced in the work of creation.

Thomas, as opposed to Augustine, inclines towards the immediate production of the body of man by God because of the absence of any sufficient natural factors for such production. But he agrees that there is no philosophical reason militating against the gradual preparation of the material for such a body by other forces acting through powers given them by God. In any case, it is never a question of any other than God producing the final human composite made up of body and soul; the question is merely one of the preparation of the material for the infusion of the soul by God. In a word, as far as the body of man goes, there is no reason for serious opposition to the theory of evolution; on the other hand, there is no compelling reason for an enthusiastic embrace of every evolutionary theory advanced. A good many have gone by the board already; probably a good many more will follow. So far it is not at all proved that the body of man actually did develop from some lower form.

The actual design of the human body was an artistic triumph worthy of divine ingenuity. What defects there are in man’s constitution come from the nature of the material that had to be used if man were to be the link binding together the material and the spiritual worlds; no amount of skill on the part of the craftsman can make a sword durable if he is confined to tin as to his material, nor can divine ingenuity find any natural escape from the defects of matter when matter must enter into the essential composition of a creature. As we shall see later on in this book, and again in the second volume, these natural defects were remedied by the preternatural gifts given man for his life in the Garden of Eden.

It is true that some animals have keener smell than men, others keener sight, and so on. But this was because man’s senses were ordered to his higher knowledge so that a nice balance was struck lest any one of his senses interfere with his reason; not many human ears are so keen that a man cannot think because of the racket made by a cat tramping over a rug. In the fundamental sense of touch, and in those internal senses which so immediately serve reason — imagination, memory, appreciation — man far excels the animals.

We have no horns, claws or covering of hair and, normally, our hides are not too thick; in other words, man is shorn of the weapons and coverings naturally given to other animals. He does not have even a speck of fur or just a few of the porcupine’s spikes. In place of these natural protections, man has his reason and his hands: by these he can prepare weapons for himself, provide himself with covering and the other necessities of life in an infinite variety. It is only the human female that does not have to wear the same coat of fur for a lifetime.

Man stands erect while the other animals normally go about on all fours; and for very good reasons. His senses are ordered primarily to intellectual delights, not to the search for sensible delights; he should not have his face to the ground as though concentrating on sensible things but rather high up where he can get a broad view of the sensible world, seeing it from all angles. To give his interior powers full play, it is right that his brain be placed above all the other parts of his body, that nothing might weigh heavy upon it and interfere with its operation. If man did not stand erect, he would have to use his hands for front feet, thereby seriously interfering with their usefulness; if he went about on all fours, he would have to take his foods with his lips and mouth, dispensing with all books of etiquette but at the same time thickening his lips, hardening them and roughening the tongue to the impediment of his powers of speech. Moreover, as the superior part of a creature is that by which nourishment is taken, the stature of man accurately places him in the world of creation: the plants have their superior part (the roots) pointed toward earth; the animals occupy a neutral position; while man points towards heaven.

His partner

In the very beginning, God Himself noticed that man needed a helper; a fact that has been observed by, or called to the attention of, many a man since. It was fitting, then, that woman should have been created from the very beginning of things. However, the fact that Adam needed a helper did not imply that woman was created that she might crawl into overalls and go out into the fields; for such purposes Adam might better have been given a hired man. But obviously the human race would not have lasted very long if God had created only a man.

Time and manner of the production of women

According to the medicine of his century, which, of course, Thomas did not correct, woman was an incomplete man, a half-baked male, whose unfinished characteristics come about through some weakness in the parents, some disposition in the human material or some extrinsic cause such as, for example, a strong south wind at the time of conception. Nevertheless Thomas thinks it is unjust to consider woman a cosmic accident; she was not an accident, this creature was made on purpose, deliberately planned by God. Further, he insists that the notion of subjection of woman to man be properly understood. It by no means signifies that woman is the slave of man, subject to man for his utility; rather, the domestic subjection is an ordinary requisite for order; it is subjection, not inferiority. Of course, when more than one free individual are living together and working for a common end there must be someone in charge, one governor, one director. Certainly this subjection is not inferiority; above all, it is not inferiority in any subjective sense: woman is not less human than man, her soul cannot be denied equality with his, and so on. Rather, this subjection is a statement of difference, of unequal gifts that counter-balance each other, making of man and woman a balanced whole. Among the peculiar gifts of man Thomas mentions discretion of reason, which beyond doubt means excellence in speculative reasoning; leaving the obvious corollary to be drawn, namely, that woman excels in practical reasoning.

Her relation to man

There are many reasons why woman was fittingly formed from Adam himself. Among others might be mentioned the preservation of the dignity of the first man as head of the whole human race, by way of likeness to God Who is the head of the whole universe. Then, too, this served to augment and conserve the love of man for woman as for one who came from himself, giving it some what the note of the love of a parent for a child; this increase and protection of love was of great importance in the human species where the union of the two sexes was indissoluble. As in the domestic life man is the head of the woman, it was fitting that woman come from man as from her principle; into the union of the two there was introduced, from this moment of origin, a note of sanctity and consecration from the fact that woman, proceeding from the side of man, was the figure of the Church proceeding from the side of Christ.

It is to be particularly noted that woman came from the side of man, formed from his rib. she was not taken from his head, lest she get the notion of dominating man; nor from his feet, lest she be despised by man as subject to him by way of a slave. To Thomas it was obvious that woman’s body was immediately produced by God; for certainly no one else could produce such a masterpiece from such humble material.

Conclusion: Pertinence of the question of the origin of the world To the mind of man

In concluding this chapter it is very much to the point to insist that this question of the origin of the world is not a purely speculative or academic affair the outcome of which makes no difference to individual men and women. The human mind is simply not made to shrug off a question as fundamental as this. That innate, driving insistence to know the why of things that gives the mind of man no rest is hardly likely to be content to know what this or that wheel is for while the meaning of the whole vast machine of the universe is hidden. The human mind has to have an answer to this question, however many others remain unanswered; and it will have an answer, though it concoct it from the monstrous materials of falsehood offered it by a world afraid of truth.

To the life of man

After all, a man has to live in this world, use it or be used by it year after year. Is it of no importance to him to discover that the whole is devoid of meaning and his puny life is a kind of vital insanity? Is it of no importance for him to be given a meaning that is totally false; that, for instance, reduces him to a part of a process, an accident in a biological experiment, a moment in the life of some organistic monster that uses him to his own destruction? Is it not important that he should find that the world he lives in is an intelligent product of a supreme intelligence, that he is its peak, that all beneath him is for the carving out of an eternally enduring personal life? It is hardly likely that men, embracing these different answers to the question of the origin of the universe, will live their lives with the same hope, the same intensity, the same courage, the same strong effort: for men, however ignorant they may be, are not universally fools.

Contrast of the answers: From the appraisal of reason

In our time, the answers to the question of the origin of the universe boil down to two, the answer of creation and the answer of evolution; that is to say, there is only one answer given, the answer of creation, for the other denies the necessity of an answer for a universe that is without cause or purpose. On the grounds of reason the modern man is hardly offered a choice, at least in this sense that there is little choice for the human mind between madness and sanity. The one, on the basis of a self-sufficient universe with no trace of its self-sufficiency, offers a man a process in place of an explanation, a contradiction in place of truth, fiction in face of facts, disorder as the explanation of order. The other, on the basis of a supreme cause whose existence can be demonstrably shown, faces the facts and bows to the inherent dependence of all that is not God; it gives man an explanation, challenges him with the truth, and commands his respect for the order he cannot hide from his eyes.

There is much more to the apparent choice than the intellectual aspect of truth or Falsehood; there is the difference between despair and hope, between a livable human life and a life that is completely shorn of livability. For if there be no personal end to human life, there is no point in personal concern with the means of living that life, means that can be means only in name. If there is nothing above that man, there is no ground for his hope, no sense to his sorrows, no excuse for his efforts, no reason to his courage; love, triumph, success, justice and all the rest are catchwords coined to lure man into a struggle where he loses even though he wins. But if he comes from the hand of God and goes his way to God, if every hair of his head is numbered, every moment of his life under his command, and ultimate success or failure not only a possibility but a certainty, then, indeed, man has something to live for. He can, and will, face the risks, take the blows, struggle to his feet after defeat, refuse to quit and scorn to bow his head to the things that are his servants. Yes, it does indeed make a difference what answer is given to the question of the origin of the world; the difference, in a word, between a human and an inhuman life.

From the consequences of each

CHAPTER XIII — THE LORD OF THE WORLD(Q. 75-80)

1. The unknown lord:

    (a) Essential knowledge about man.

    (b) Essential ignorance about man:

               (1) Its varieties.

               (2) Its origins.

               (3) The escape from it.

2. Life of the lord of the world:

    (a) Principle of life.

    (b) Its immaterial and subsistent character.

    (c) Its immortality.

    (d) Its incompleteness:

               (1) General notion of matter and form.

               (2) The soul the form of the body.

3. Is Equipment for action of the lord of the world:

    (a) in general:

               (1) Distinction and number of the potencies of man.

               (2) Their subject.

               (3) Their duration

    (b) in particular

               (1) Some lower potencies:

                   a. Vegetative potencies.

                   b. Sensitive potencies:

                               1. External.

                               2. Internal.

               (2) Higher potencies of knowledge:

                   a. Active and possible intellect.

                   b. Reason and intellect.

4. Volitional equipment of the lord of the world. (Next chapter.)

Conclusion:

  1. Philosophy based on ignorance of man is a philosophy of degradation.

  2. It is possible only by a distortion of one side of human nature.

  3. Its result is the destruction of the whole of human nature.

  4. Its goal is despair.

CHAPTER XIII THE LORD OF THE WORLD (Q. 75-80)

The unknown lord

A GREAT deal has been made recently of the things we do not know about man. A best seller of not so long ago spent many dark pages on detailed statements of the damage our ignorance has done, institutes of human relations have been set up in great centers of learning to weave our piecemeal knowledge into a durable fabric; scientists are busy with every detail of man’s physical life. For all our awakened interest in the study of man, the cardinal point has been overlooked, namely, that the essential thing to know about man is what he is.

Essential knowledge about man

We must at least know the nature of man before we can intelligently discuss any detail of his life. If this much is not known, there can be no real knowledge of the powers of man: we may be impatient at them, as a child is angry with a toy bird because it will not sing; or we may overlook them, as a starving man might sit down to die on a priceless antique chair, not knowing its value in terms of money and food. Without this essential knowledge, a man can be satisfied to eat the husks of swine when he might have been dining on the fare of kings or he can be straining after the impossible, surely he cannot know the boundlessness or the limitations of his hopes. The very necessity of nature itself guarantees the different actions of a pet monkey and a canary bird, but man has to know what he is and where he is going; he must choose a goal for his actions and point them at that goal, for his actions are deliberate. Only by knowing such a goal, fitted to the kind of nature he has, can a man determine whether his life has been a success or a failure, for it is only in terms of a human goal that a human life can be judged.

Essential ignorance about man

The essential ignorance about man, then, is the defect of this essential knowledge. Man must know himself, must know at least what he is, if he is to live a human life. In spite of the essential importance of this fundamental knowledge, men from the beginning — and perhaps more so today — have made serious mistakes about the very nature of man.

Its varieties

He has been seen as pure spirit, an angel or a god, with the disastrous results of despair or the tragically comic results of childish pretense. He has been judged to be a mixture or conglomeration of spirit and matter, a lost spirit imprisoned in the flesh or a wandering mind; a strange monster whose constituent elements are more incompatible than oil and water. In our time, the tendency has been to exclude the spiritual from man altogether; from this premise, the steps have led steadily downward until there is now no further step to be taken.

In this materialistic light, man has been seen as a mere animal, a nice, bright, friendly animal, to be sure, but no different essentially from the rest of the animal world. Some of those who see man this way think he should make the most of his animality; others advise him to try, for appearances’ sake, to forget it; still others ask him, while insisting on his pure animality, to act as though he had a spiritual soul. Another group sees man as merely a chemical compound. His essence will some day be reduced to a chemical formula, his dreams are no more than the things that happen in a test tube: meanwhile he is not to be too upset by the action and reaction, the explosions, the precipitations and strange flavors that mark his life, since there is, after all, nothing he can do about it. This would seem to place man low enough in the scale of things to satisfy his bitterest enemy; but another group has found a still more insulting estimate of man. Man is only a machine, necessarily producing the acts he does, the thoughts he thinks, the struggles he puts up, the illusion of love much as a sausage machine turns out its product if the right material is fed into it.

Its origins

These truly terrible estimations of the nature of man might have come as a numbing shock to our age if we had not been so well prepared for them. As a matter of fact, they are not even a surprise; they are the inevitable result of a refusal to take the whole of man into consideration in determining his nature, the willingness to take the frosting or the cake, but not both. Then, too, this insulting ignorance of man did not happen today or yesterday. Very early in the history of mankind the attempt was made to get along without the material world. A no less energetic denial of the spiritual world dates from the Greek materialists and is almost universal in America today. Naturally, if either matter or spirit is denied in human nature, that quiet, peace-loving creature we call man is replaced by a monster. Modern philosophy eased into the denial of the spiritual by quietly assassinating the intellect. With that out of the way and man’s knowledge completely limited to the field of the senses, there is little to differentiate man from the physical world in which he moves.

The escape from it

Not infrequently, the denial of the material or the spiritual in man has been motivated by cowardice, a flabbiness of heart that sought escape from the difficulties of human life by denying the humanity of it. For there are difficulties in the material side of human nature that no shocked rolling of the eyes, no amount of deep breathing or self-hypnosis can obliterate; just as there are terrific responsibilities in the spiritual side of man’s nature that no amount of pleasure, no constant round of activity, no self-induced forgetfulness can wipe from the mind of a man. To men and women who shudder to mix with the rough reality of physical existence, an easy way out has been to deny it; just as those who preferred to cast their lot with the animal, or even with the inanimate, world, made their path easier by denying the spiritual. The pity of it has always been that these men could not follow their chosen paths alone but have always attempted to justify themselves in their own eyes, and in the eyes of men, by preaching their foolishness from the housetops to ensnare the simple, silly ones of the world.

Life of the lord of the world

There is no need to set up a super-science and dedicate it to a life-long search of hosts in order to get some hint of what man is. The knowledge of human nature is not so difficult to come at. All we need do is to look at the human activity that goes into the living of human life all about us, or, indeed, within us. We may whip a puppy for chewing up shoes, but we are not silly enough to whip a tree for crashing through the roof in a storm; we know one little bit about these different natures by the way they act, at least we perceive that the whipping may do the puppy some good and that it will have no effect on the tree whatsoever. We are not surprised that lilacs do not sing, though we expect song from a bird; and we are sure that no amount of careful watering or fertilizing will make a sidewalk any longer. In all this, we are proceeding on a judgment of different natures reached by a knowledge of the activities of those natures. It always remains true that activity follows the same line as the nature from which it proceeds; things have specifically different activities because of their specifically different natures.

Principle of life

So we can tell immediately the difference between the living and the dead. To ask what is a man is only to ask what does a man do, what is his particular specific activity, what can we expect from a man that we can expect from absolutely nothing else in the world. If he is alive, he must be active, for, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, life is immanent activity. That activity avid mirror the nature of the principle from which it flows in man, just as it does in a bird, a tree or a horse.

Its immaterial and subsistent character

One of the obviously distinctive things a man does is to know. From the objects with which this knowledge deals we have an immediate indication of the nature of man. Just from these few pages, it is clear that man knows cake, frosting, puppies, trees, canary birds, sidewalks and lilacs; as a matter of fact, man knows all material things, or he can know them, something he could not do if his faculty of knowledge had anything of material in it, any more than his faculty of vision can see all colors looking through green glasses. In other words, all corporal natures are fixed within corporal limitations; if the mind of man were corporal, then that corporal limitation would impede its knowledge of other corporal natures, just as a bad taste in a man’s mouth affects his relish of everything he eats. From the point of view of its objects, then, one action of man, the act of intellectual knowledge, is immaterial, which is the same as saying that it is spiritual.

Its immortality

We are thus forced to admit, from the ordinary activity of man, that man has an operation independent of corporal nature. If the activity is independent, of course the principle from which that activity flows is of that same nature — it is independent of corporal nature, it is spiritual. This independent principle of activity, since it can operate free of corporal nature, can exist free of corporal nature; for always the operation follows in the steps of the nature from which it proceeds.

To look at the matter from the point of view of man’s activities themselves, rather than the objects of those activities, the very fact that man reasons is evidence that the principle of his reasoning is independent of corporal nature. At first sight, this statement looks obscure; but if we take it apart, see it step by step, its full force is clearly seen. Reasoning is no more than the comparison of judgment with judgment; and a judgment is normally a comparison with an abstract idea. In other words, the independent nature of reasoning has its first foundation in our possession of abstract ideas. We may grumble at wetness or marvel at beauty, but we shall never drown from falling into wetness or be injured by bumping into beauty. We can know not only this thing, but things in the abstract; a feat that surpasses the concrete character and singularity of the corporal world. This is an activity explicable only by a principle that itself surpasses the corporal, for, as the non-lethal blows of an infant’s fist will clearly show us, the effect is not greater than its cause, the activity does not surpass the manner of existence.

Many consequences of man’s possession of abstract ideas are advanced in proof of the spiritual character of his soul. It is noted, for instance, that man alone speaks, has a moral sense, holds to religious ideals, can learn, cook his food, concoct weapons and so on. To these are added the long list of outstanding human achievements. But, as a matter of fact, these additional arguments are quite unnecessary; from the basic arguments of the objects of man’s activities and the activities themselves we have a clear insight into the fundamental differentiation of man’s soul from the souls of the brutes.

Animals, as living creatures, also have innate principles of life and activity, they have souls. In their activity, however, the brutes betray no operation that is independent of corporal nature; their activities are the activities of sense life. Consequently, the principle from which this activity flows, as it cannot act dependently, cannot exist independently; again that central truth must be insisted on, activity is an indication of the nature of the soul, as an effect is an indication of the nature of its cause. The very intensity of these brute activities is distinctly limited; noises too loud will deafen them as lights too bright will blind them, for the corporal change demanded in every sensitive operation corrupts the sense which it affects. On the contrary, the object of intelligence, as it is more perfect, rather than corrupting the intellect, perfects it for other and more intense operations. To put the whole thing simply, it is enough to point out that even in their knowledge the brutes do not know things; they know this or that thing, not the abstract. It is not surprising, then, that they have never reached to the consequences that have followed in man from the possession of abstract ideas. It has been well said that the “animal is a queer mixture of stupidity and natural accomplishment; of cleverness and unteachableness; of natural ability and no development.” These things cannot be said of a man.

To conclude, from the independent existence of the human soul, that the soul was the whole man, would be a serious mistake. A man is, or at least should be, no less human when he eats than when he thinks. It would be much less tiring if a woman could accomplish her shopping in the few seconds it takes the mind to run through a department store, while her body was tossed into a corner or laid out comfortably on a bed; but it cannot be done. It is the same person who walks, laughs, talks and thinks. Man is not to be defined by his soul alone. That human soul, great as its prerogatives may be, is still only a part of man, an essential element of the composite that is man. It is no less a deformity to exclude the body from the notion of what man is than to exclude the soul; whether you make a god, an angel or an animal of man, you have destroyed man. This point need not be labored: if man’s nature is indicated by the objects with which his activities deal and by those activities themselves, it demands no philosophical cleverness to see that he has a body as well as a soul.

Its incompleteness

In fact, we can push this further and say that even though that immaterial soul is spiritual and immortal, it is still incomplete without the body. Obviously the human soul is simple. for, lacking all material, it cannot have parts. The very notion of parts postulates quantity, a divisibility that is inseparable from matter and so unthinkable in a substance that is immaterial. Moreover, the fact that it is utterly simple and at the same time capable of subsisting of itself (as it quite evidently is capable of operating of itself) is a definition of its spirituality; a subsistent principle of activity independent of matter is spiritual. It is immortal, for there is no way to destroy it. It cannot unravel, it cannot come apart; it cannot be separated from that which gives it life, for it is itself the principle of life; it cannot be swept into oblivion by the destruction of another on which it depends, as a lamp might be destroyed by the collapse of the stand on which it has been placed, for it is independent. In other words, it is incorruptible because there is no possibility of either intrinsic or extrinsic corruption.

It can, of course, be annihilated by God. But this is not so much a question of God’s reaching out to strike it into nothingness, as of God’s not reaching out to conserve it, cutting off the supply of existence from the human soul. For the soul of man, like everything created, merely borrows its finite existence from the infinite existence of God; it is not independent of the first cause either in its entry into existence or in the continuation of its existence. In common with all created things, the human soul has the metaphysical composition of essence and existence.

Yet this soul without its body is incomplete; it is not fully itself unless it be united to the body. It is not an angel, assuming a fictitious body for an occasion; it is the lowest substance in the intellectual world and ordered, by its very nature, to union with the body. Left to itself, it could discern nothing; its mind would remain a blank sheet, radically incapable of completing itself by its own strength, sterile and inactive without the complement by which alone it enters into relation with the objects it can know and assimilate.

It is an extremely grave mistake to look upon the soul’s presence in the body as a punishment, making the body a prison in which the soul serves its time. The body is good and a source of good to the soul joined to it; it is the one link by which the soul can attain its complete perfection. Nor is this an oddity in the universe. Rather, it is a continuation of the harmony that runs through all the work of the divine architect: the imperfect is always for the perfect, the eye for the whole man, vegetative life for sensitive life, sensitive life for intellectual life, all for the sake of the whole. On a larger scale, each creature is for its own act, its own perfection, the less noble for the more noble, all for the universe and the universe for God. The soul, then, is an incomplete substance tending to complete itself; and by this very tendency, it is a principle of operation. It is a perfection crying for its fullness; and that fullness is obtained through union with the body.

Its incompleteness: General notion of matter and form.

The difficulty is how to unite such a splendid spiritual substance with the matter which, thus united, becomes the human body. A mere mixture of the two will not do. An utterly simple soul cannot be stirred into matter as sugar is in coffee, any more than a mathematical point can be dropped into a glass of wine. It is not sufficient merely to throw them together, as so many rocks in one pile; for the secret of this creature man is his unity, he is precisely one whole and all his acts testify to that unity. Nor is it enough to postulate a mere association of the two, like a rider in a saddle or a motor in a boat. These two incomplete substances must be united in a way that will result in one complete unit, one complete whole. In other words, the soul must be the substantial form of the body.

To a man who is not a philosopher, the words “matter” and “substantial form” look as formidable as a mechanic’s tool kit does to one who lacks mechanical ability. If we describe matter as the determined element and substantial form as the determining element of physical things and then look at the two in the concrete, their terrifying aspect vanishes for then they cease to be strangers and we recognize them as old, familiar neighbors. It is obvious, for instance, that before the soul’s coming, there is only the possibility of a man, the seed and the ovum, not a man; after the soul departs, there is nothing left but a corpse. It is clear, then, that if is the soul that determines the matter of the body to its human status; it is the soul that gives the body its specific note, making it human. It gives the body being and is the source of the body’s human activities; we should be quite right in being frightened, astonished or utterly incredulous if a corpse sat up and guffawed in the face of the mourners.

The same truth is evident if we look at it from the side of the specific operations of man. It would be pointless to sit hour by hour by a corpse trying to argue with it, waiting for an inspiring word or a flash of genius to come from the dead man’s mouth. It is the soul that is the principle of intellectual operations, that is, of the operations by which man is distinguished from every other creature, his specific operations. It is, then, the determinant of the species in man, his substantial form.

Substantial forms are an active, domineering race. The common note of their work has left a common mark on all of them, however low or high they may be, they are as easily recognized as officers of an army drilled to the perfection of precision. No one of them, for examples can tolerate doing its work through an underling; no one of them will give an equal a word to say in its work; all are much too self-sufficient to travel in pairs; all are fussy enough, and capable enough, to keep every inch of their domain under their thumb every single moment.

The soul the form of the body

Of course, the soul of man, being a substantial form, shares these common characteristics. It is not united to corporal matter through a medium, an underling, such as a sensitive soul, one other body, or some other accidental or substantial form. its union is immediate; and it leaves no room for any other soul in man. The soul is the unique cause of man’s being, of his living, his animality, his human characteristics. Nor is this particularly surprising. It is a common fact of nature that the more powerful forms have more extensive activity. Thus, in the hierarchy of forms, the inanimate have the very minimum of activity, that of being; plant forms embrace the activity of the inanimate forms and add their own; animal forms include the activity of the inanimate and the plant forms, and add their own; and 50 on. To put it another way, the higher forms have a greater quantity of being; they have shared more fully, participated more completely of that supreme being. They imitate God more closely and exclude all inferior forms as superfluous; they themselves have all that the inferior forms possess, and more. Like every other substantial form, the soul is present in every part of the matter it informs, in every part of the body; and it is whole in every part of the body. The tail is not less feline than the head of a cat, nor is a finger less human than the head of a man; yet what there is of humanity in every part of man comes from the specific principle of humanity within man, from his soul. Instead of thinking, as we ordinarily do, of the body, containing the soul, it would perhaps be more accurate to thinly of the soul containing the body.

Man, then, is a composite made up of matter and form, of spirit and matter. Neither of these constitutes the species, both are incomplete; but from their substantial union comes that lord of the material world which we call man, the creature whose form is supreme among all forms in matter, reaching that peak of domination of things physical that brings us to the borderland of angelic independence. So much for the nature of man. We know now that he is not divine, not angelic, not bestial, but human.

Equipment for action of the lord of the world:

In general: Distinction and number of the potencies of man.

A glance, however, at man’s actions will show us at once that we have not investigated all of man’s equipments The soul is the radical principle of all action; but then, the locomotive is the principle of all motion of the train, but it moves by its wheels. That is, the soul does not directly produce these actions of man; a man walks but with his feet and legs, he talks but with his tongue, he thinks but with his intellect. As a matter of fact, God is the only one whose act flows directly from his essence, He alone rather is His intelligence than has His intelligence. This truth seems obscure, but actually it is so obvious that it is hard to see. A man’s soul is a substantial form: it acts directly in the substantial line to complete the substantial composite. Now, patently, man’s actions are not substantial things: his laughs do not clutter up the house his thoughts do not have to be bathed, fed and sent off to school; they are accidents in the philosophical sense of existing only in something else, not in themselves. Their immediate cause, then, is one proportioned to them, an accidental form, not a substantial one. Supposing the contrary were true, suppose the soul did produce all the acts of man directly. By its very essence the soul is a determining principle, it is the active, the moving principle; it cannot take a day off, demand a sick leave, or retire for a siesta for its very nature demands ceaseless determining activity. Of it is the direct cause of our actions, then we never stop talking, thinking, willing, hearing, seeing and all the rest; which, thank God, is completely false.

If we are to act, we must have proximate accidental principles of action. Being what we are, we shall have to have a great many of them. Creatures below man reach a moderate perfection by few movements; man himself reaches a very high perfection by many and complex movements; the angels reach complete perfection by very, very few movements; while God has infinite perfection without any movement at all. Perhaps the full significance of this can be grasped from a parallel in the human order: some men maintain a precarious health by many remedies; some maintain perfect health with a few remedies; while others, have perfect health without ever entering a drugstore or consulting a doctor. In other words, the multiplicity of our accidental forms is at the same time a statement of our perfection relative to the material world, and a statement of our imperfection relative to the spiritual world.

Their subject

For all their number and complexity, there is no difficulty distinguishing these proximate accidental principles of operation which are called the powers or faculties of man; we have only to look at their destination to escape the misfortune of trying to we the ear for sight or the eye for sound. There is, in fact, a distinct hierarchy of these powers of man nicely graduated according to the universality of the objects at which they aim. The vegetative powers act only on man’s own body; the sensitive powers work on all sensible bodies; while the intellective powers extend to all being. The same hierarchy can be traced if our measuring rod is the degree of immateriality of the object at which the different powers aim. Thus bare life transcends the inanimate character of matter; sense knowledge receives material things within the knower, stripping them of the ragged clothes of matter, but leaving them the familiar material conditions; intellectual knowledge completely strips its guests of all matter and material conditions, insisting that they put on the bright garment of immateriality before they enter the house of the mind.

Their duration

Neither is there much difficult in determining, in a general way, the location or place of residence of these faculties in man. The inorganic powers of intellect and will which operate with intrinsic independence of matter are to be found in the only inorganic element of the human composite, in the soul of man. It is only the soul that can act with intrinsic independence of matter. The vegetative and sensitive faculties of man are clearly not to be found in the soul alone, for they are intimately involved in matter; neither are they to be bound in the body alone, for the body alone cannot produce the acts proper to these powers. Rather they are powers subjected in the composite of soul and body; not in either of the constituents of this composite. From this it is evident that the faculties of intellect and will endure as long as the soul endures, that is, forever; on the other hand, the vegetative and sensitive faculties endure only as long as the composite which is man endures, that is, until the separation of the soul and body in death.

In particular

Coming down to an examination of these powers of man in particular, we encounter somewhat the same difficulty as would be found in a complete survey of the life of the universe. Man is a little universe in himself; certainly he has, in himself, a summary of the life of the universe and, consequently, a multiplicity of faculties that is al bewildering, in its way, as the spectacle of the varied life in the world in which we live. To inspect each of these faculties in itself, without relation to anything else, would seem to serve no purpose beyond increasing our bewilderment, just as a study of the individual parts of the universe, with no attempt at correlation merely packs a man’s head so full of facts and his eyes so full of sights that he can neither think nor see. We must, then, throughout, try to see these faculties of man in their relation to man himself and to the rest of life in the universe; we must read them in their context, not in isolated texts; they must be seen in the grandeur of the whole picture, not in violently extracted sections.

Some lower potencies:

From this point of view, man has powers in common with the plants, others in common with the animals, and still others that are entirely distinctive to himself. In all three we meet again that harmonious flowing of one into the other that marks the whole genius of creation. There is a union between these different faculties so close as almost to defy an attempt to mark clearly the line that distinguishes them; it is this close harmony that has been, too often, the cause of the eager attempts to conclude that man is only a plant or only an animal, or that all animals and plants are intelligent beings as man is.

Vegetative potencies

The vegetative powers, common to man and plants, have, as their primary purpose, the inception of life and the protection of that life; this purpose is accomplished through three distinct operations, namely: generation; growth or increase to the point demanded by the perfection of the body; and finally nutrition or the conservation of that life. Of the three, generation is supreme and intimately approaches the activity of the animal or sense faculties; it is the only vegetative faculty that operates on a body other than its own.

Sensitive potencies:

The sensitive powers of man parallel the same powers in an animal. A teacher, who was not at all sure of himself, facing a class that was far too inquisitive for comfort, could hurry past these by stating dogmatically that these powers are of two kinds, external and internal, frowning heavily the while to snuff out any question before it could break into flame. But, of course, this would be cheating; for it would be ignoring the fact that there are five external senses and four internal ones, for a grand total of nine. Still, the teacher certainly would have his reasons for sidestepping a subject as complex as this.

External

The whole picture of the five external senses in operation can be obtained by observing so commonplace an affair as a man coming home from work and wandering into the kitchen as dinner is being prepared; providing, of course, that the man is normal, that he does take a taste of this and that, drop a comment or two and then get out from under his wife’s feet. If he spent the long moments that intervene before the serving of dinner in analyzing that little jaunt of his into the kitchen, he would discover something like this. Two of his external senses had made a contact with sensible reality as real as a contact of a fist with a face, and with the same consequent material modifications, on a much milder scale, to be sure: his sense of touch had been struck by the warmth of the kitchen; his sense of taste was affected by the nibble which did things both to the sense itself and to the food he had so cautiously pilfered. Ruminating further, he would notice that two other external senses, while not smashing into sensible reality, had definitely been in contact with it through a medium: he had smelled the cooking food and heard his own words to his wife. The last of his external senses, his sight, had accomplished its purpose without direct contact, without material change either in his eyes or in the objects of sight: his eyes had not actually caressed his wife, she had not climbed into his eyes, nor was the food mangled by his greedy glance.

Internal

A great help in drawing up his analysis was furnished by his internal sense which goes by the name of common sense, discriminating between the work of the external senses, protecting him from using his eye for tasting and so on. For each of the external senses is nailed down to its particular object; consequently some common centre of sense perception is necessary, some clearing house which distinguishes between the external senses and their operations. This man was led to the kitchen in the first place by another of his internal senses, his imagination; for obviously, viewing these senses now purely from the animal or sensitive angle, it is only by the power of retaining a sense species gathered by the external senses that an animal can set itself in motion to obtain an absent good. His retreat from the kitchen was dictated by his estimative faculty with its power to directly apprehend the harmful or beneficial qualities of sensible things that are certainly not the object of the eye, the ear, the nose or any of the other external senses. These are not strictly sense qualities. Finally, as he sat there thinking it all over, he would be regaled by his memory, the last of his internal senses, which is a storehouse of the sensible species; from it are spontaneously revived species precisely as past, a non-sensible quality that escapes the imagination and so demands another faculty or power and which is so particular, so contingent, as to demand that it be taken care of by the sense powers of man. It is to be noted that the estimative power and the memory approach analogously very close to the operations of the intellect, being differentiated from it by the particular character and material limitations of their objects.

Higher potencies of knowledge

Over and above the vegetative and sensitive principles of operations, man’s distinctively human faculties are the spiritual powers of intellect and will, of knowledge and volition. These are so complex in their operation, and so very important that they will receive separate treatment in the two succeeding chapters of this volume. In this chapter, however, a few rough strokes must be added to complete the picture of man’s specific equipment at least as regards knowledge.

Active and possible intellect

Two intellectual faculties are distinguished in man: one that can know but as yet does not, the possible intellect; the other, which does not know but makes knowledge a proximate possibility. This distinction is really no more than our recognition of the fact that man does learn and that he learns of abstract things. He has, then, a faculty that acquires knowledge. But the objects of our knowledge are universal or abstract (as we have already seen to some degree and will see more thoroughly later) and universals are not to be found wandering about the streets, hiding in woods or swimming in streams. If only the possible intellect existed, only the faculty which acquires knowledge, nothing would ever be known. Another faculty is necessary to make these concrete, existing things of the world fit subjects of our knowledge; the faculty that universalizes these concrete things, that makes them abstract, is called the active intellect.

Reason and Intellect

What we ordinarily call intellectual memory is really not a separate faculty at all; it is merely the act of our intellects retaining the intellectual species. Certainly it does not retain these species precisely as past, for that is a concrete, limited, material connotation which is proper to the sense faculties and impossible to immaterial, universal objects. Neither do the words “intelligence” and “reason” denote different faculties, but rather different acts of the same faculty: the one, a simple direct knowledge of truth which approaches the mode of angelic knowledge; the other, the labored acquisition of truth by way of comparison which is proper to man. “Synderesis” and “conscience,” too, must be ruled out as distinct faculties: the first is no more than the habit by which we hold to first practical principles; the second is merely a practical judgment of the intellect as to what is to be done or avoided, what is right or wrong.

Conclusion:

1. Philosophy based on ignorance of man is a philosophy of degradation

From even this superficial glance at man, it is evident that he is a composite of body and soul. Within himself he contains the powers of inanimate, plant and animal creation; and surpasses them by his distinctively human power. He is not an animal, though he has a body, he is not an angel, though he has a spiritual soul that cannot be destroyed. He is a man, the connecting link between the material and the spiritual worlds. A philosophy that is blind to this essential knowledge of man is necessarily a philosophy of degradation, however sincerely its authors intend to defend man’s humanity, however high they hope to elevate man, however desperately they champion human beings.

It is possible only by a distortion of one side of human nature

These are not merely large statements that can be supported only by fragmentary evidence and loose interpretations. They are facts evidenced abundantly in both the theoretical and practical sphere of twentieth century life. On the theoretical level, for example, modern philosophy, neglecting the spiritual in man, degrades man to the level of an animal, a chemical or a machine; or, neglecting the material in man, degrades him to wraith-like proportions and exiles him from the world in which he must live. In either case, there has been an ignorance of man and so an ignorance of man’s life. He has been tricked into attempting to live the life of an animal or to parody angelic or divine life; but it has been made consistently more difficult for him to lead human life.

Its result is the destruction of the whole of human nature

In the practical spheres if man is an animal obviously he can demand no more from himself than he demands from other animals; if made, such demands are hopeless of fulfillment. High ideals, noble goals, respect, honor, enduring love, self-mastery, justice and all the rest are illusions he is foolish to take seriously. Under these circumstances, why should not a man plunge into gangsterism to the contempt of the rights of all others; why should not a government be contemptuous of the human individual, of the human rights of its own subjects, what is there to hold it back from sheer brutality practised on the most immediately advantageous scale? Or, to go to the other extreme, why should men not despair in the evident hopelessness of trying to live an angelic life devoid of angelic equipment, why should they not mock at themselves as they absurdly pose on the throne of divinity? What motive is left For a man to struggle for success, for mastery of himself, for virtue and a goal worth reaching for?

Its goal is despair

To ignore one side of man is to make a monster out of him. To make him all angel or all animal, we must destroy half of him. And man can no more live in that condition than can a horse that has been split in half. His very animality becomes a thing of disgust to the animal world; his angelic parodies, a shock to the invisible world. The end of either mistake can only be a complete loss of the notion of a human individual, a sacred person, not to be sunk in a mass, a race, a nation, not to be debarred from contact with a world into which he has been born. That is, the end of either mistake must be despair. Man has one end and he was given a nature equipped for the attainment of that end — and adequate to no other. Of course he must fail miserably if he is made to aim at an inhuman goal by reason of his conviction of inhuman powers to achieve a goal.

CHAPTER XIV — THE WILL OF THE LORD OF THE WORLD
(Q. 81-83)

1. A disturbing fact:

    (a) The mystery of the human will.

    (b) Irritation at the mystery.

    (c) Facts of the mystery.

2. The appetite of man:

    (a) Fact of his appetite.

    (b) Its harmony with universal order.

3. The humanity of man’s appetite:

    (a) of his sensitive appetite:

               (1) The fact of it.

               (2) Its varieties.

               (3) Its relation to reason and will.

    (b) of his intellectual appetite — the fact of it.

4. The nature of man s will:

    (a) Universality of its object.

    (b) Necessary objects.

    (c) Free objects:

               (1) The nature of freedom:

                   a. Freedom and necessity.

                   b. Freedom and law.

               (2) Proofs of freedom:

                   a. From the nature of human knowledge — proximate source

of freedom.

                   b. From conscience.

                   c. The moral argument.

                   d. Argument from divine government of universe — radical

source of freedom.

5. Relations of will and intellect:

    (a) Mutual movement.

    (b) Mutual superiority.

Conclusion:

  1. Facts of man’s appetite.

  2. A disturbing fact in the universe.

  3. A disturbing fact in human life.

CHAPTER XIV THE WILL OF THE LORD OF THE WORLD (Q. 81-83)

A disturbing fact

THE last chapter, this one and the next are dedicated to answering the question: what is man? In the last chapter, it was the essence of man and his faculties in general that were principally concentrated on. In this chapter, we shall examine in detail one of the faculties of man that easily stands out as one of the most momentous facts in the universe — the motive power of man’s human actions, his human will.

The mystery of the human will

From the beginning this human will has been one of the great mysteries of the universe; and it will so remain until the end, particularly to those who are committed to a statement of the universe in terms of physical formulae. To this clerkish mind, the will is a fractious pupil disgracing the whole institution by its wanton irregularity. It escapes all measurement, all calculation. As though it were a grinning imp tossing the clumsy giant of the universe about with a kind of spiritual ju-jitsu, the will expends, with insolent ease, enormous energy in ruling the complex kingdom that is man and his possessions; yet no trace of that energy has been recorded. In a world bound by strict necessity, the will alone is totally unpredictable; in a systematic universe, it stands out incorrigibly individualist. It remains an unknown quantity as far as physical science goes; it cannot be managed but only carefully coaxed and yet, while itself so utterly intangible, it is quite capable of managing the physical world about it.

Irritation at the mystery

No wonder it has driven the wise men of our time to despair. It simply does not fit into the kind of orderly picture our times demand; so it has become necessary, to save the picture, to destroy the will, to banish it from the earth by a scientific fiat — which, exasperatingly, itself is a product of a human will.

As a product of the human will, this very banishment has the will’s refreshing variety about it; as though to underscore the huge joke of the will reading the decree of its banishment in a terrifying voice and at the same time listening to it in an attitude of abject terror, trudging off in heart-breaking loneliness and at the same time cozily sitting at home surrounded by friends. Some men have accomplished this banishment by reducing the will to mechanically monotonous regularity and necessity which, they insist, is the universal movement of all that exists. Man does what he does because he cannot help himself, rising and falling, scurrying to escape or rushing to attack drifting or driven but all the while jammed compactly into the serried ranks of the physical where no one gets out of step. This is the camp of the determinists, no little group even in our day though they belong, properly, in the nineteenth century.

Another group effects the banishment by a wave of the wand of science to make all things in the universe as unpredictable as the movements of the will of man. This is the modern school of indeterminism which insists there is no necessity whatever in the world; the apparent regularity is the product of our mathematical minds. The technique, however, is far from modern; for it has been an old, old trick, when faced with a problem, for men to solve it by denying first one then the other extreme of the dilemma.

A much more widespread type of banishment today aims at a kind of compromise by making man merely an animal, enjoying no more freedom or responsibility than the others, but no more machine-like than the others either. These are the evolutionists who have carried our popular journals and newspapers by storm and have taken charge of educational philosophy to corrupt the foundations of Christian civilization utterly.

Finally, a group less bold than the others, destroys the human will by insisting that human knowledge is limited to particular, sensible things. We can know only what can be measured and weighed and observed scientifically; so man’s appetite is limited to particular, sensible things to the exclusion of freedom.

All this makes for as orderly a picture as that of a city which insists that there be none but green traffic lights lest the citizens become confused. But it is not a pretty picture any more than a completely gray world would be a pretty world; nor is it a true picture, a fair representation of either the world or of men. These pseudo-scientific philosophers have falsified the accounts, writing down “identity” for “order” to obtain a neat result at the expense of facts.

Facts of the mystery

The facts must be met if we are to understand human life, if we are to understand and direct our own actions. It will not do to excuse ourselves from murder on grounds that would excuse a tree from growing or a cat from stretching; as a matter of fact, we know the act is entirely our own. The facts are that we have a common relationship with the animals; and, no less clearly, that we have the unique gift of freedom. No matter how these two appear to confuse the orderly world we have drawn up for ourselves, both must be faced, for we are not trying to lull ourselves to sleep with bedtime stories but rather to light our anxious steps with the lantern of truth.

The appetite of man: Fact of his appetite

Man’s motive power is certainly not that of a machine: he has an appetite. In an earlier chapter, appetite was described as the driving force of every creature in the universe; its object was pointed out as the good, possessing the smack of desirability that draws all things to action. In irrational nature, it is called natural appetite, the obedience to natural physical laws; in the animals, sense appetite, or obedience to natural physical laws operating through animal instincts; in man, it is human appetite.

The necessity for a distinctly human appetite will be clearer if we understand the close connection between the inclination of appetite and the form or determining principle. Every inclination follows some form; it may be on a least of woven steel links or the leash may be as physically intangible as a divine command, but inclination must, of its very nature, be tied up with a form. A moment’s thought makes the thing obvious; surely inclination, if it means anything, means a tendency in a determined direction and the principle of determination is precisely form. A difference in forms, then, demands a difference in inclinations to desirable objects, that is, a difference in appetite. Thus, inanimate creation and plant life possess only their own physical form, their own substantial principle of unity and life, with the result that they follow, necessarily and rigidly along the lines of that one form in entirely predictable fashion.

A creature that can know, however, possesses more than its own form. It cannot, of course, have many substantial forms, many principles of unity and life; but it can have, over and above its own substantial form, the forms of other things, forms received into itself by knowledge, determining knowledge and appetite over and above the determination given them by their own substantial form. The animal, for instance, by his sense knowledge receives particular forms — the form of a bird, a bone, a man; by that knowledge, a wider scope, a greater difference of object is immediately given to the animal’s appetite. Man, by his intellectual knowledge, possesses the universal, the specific, form of things and immediately has an infinite horizon thrown open to his appetite. To reach out to that infinite field of good revealed by the universal character of intellectual knowledge, there must be a distinctly human appetite, an appetite distinctly proportionate to the knowledge of man.

Its harmony with universal order

Nor is this an upheaval of the universal scheme of things. This is not making a special exception from nature for man; rather it is an insistence on facts as the manifestation of an order worthy of the supreme wisdom of the architect of the universe. Man is different in his appetite, precisely because he is different in his nature. Why should he be moved as the stones or animals are since he is neither a stone nor an animal? There is the same beautiful hierarchy in appetite that there is in being, in perfection, within the universe; the same gradual revelations of the beauty and perfection that is God’s.

The humanity of man’s appetite: Of his sensitive appetite

This is really the key to the apparent contradiction of man’s appetites, the often insisted on war between the flesh and the spirit. As a matter of fact, man has two appetites for his nature is a complex of matter and spirit; he receives the forms of other things, not only in an intellectual, universal fashion but also in a particular, sensible fashion as do the animals. He has, then, two appetites: a sensitive and an intellectual appetite; but both are human, both belong to man, neither is in any way a detraction from his human nature. Indeed, the denial of either one is tantamount to the destruction of the humanity of man.

The fact of it

Because it is so hard to deny the fact of wet feet or too salty food, there are few today who question our possession of sense knowledge. We do see the difference between a brown hat and a purple one, we hear a flat note in an otherwise splendid aria, we do smell the toast burning much too late to do anything about it. In other words, we, too, possess those particular species that come by the way of sense, the particular forms of things other than ourselves. As appetite marches in the footprints of knowledge, as the inclinations follow the forms possessed, there can be no doubt of our possession of a sense appetite. We can, and do, dislike burnt toast or flat notes, brown hats or purple ones; we can, and do, enjoy the brisk air of a fall morning or the lazily relaxing rays of a summer sun. You may, here and there, find a philosopher today to deny this; but there is a very good chance of your meeting him in Florida for the winter or in Maine for the summer.

The sense appetite, like all appetite, has to do with good as its proper object: either it sits back in lazy enjoyment of the good possessed, like a stuffed puppy dozing by a warm fire; or it watches with nervously alert eyes for a chance to seize the good that is not yet had but must be had. In the latter case we have the reason for action; man’s inclinations ate no more than appetite’s gentle hints or nagging demands that leave him little doubt as to what he still lacks and that give him little peace until he sets out on the long quest for the good.

Its varieties

This is the general object of the sense appetite. There is, however, a striking difference in the particular objects of sense appetite. A starving man will fight for a scrap of food just as readily as a well-fed man will relish the last dainty delicacies of a banquet; a man will, in other words, not only reach out for and enjoy the good things, he will do the hard bitter things that seem to go flatly against his inclinations for good and pleasant things. There are, then, two faculties of sense appetite: one runs after the good precisely as good or runs from its opposite; the other is the fighter of the sensual side of our nature, the champion of the milder (concupiscible) appetite and its objects. This faculty, the emergency (or irascible) appetite, deals with good but precisely as difficult; its work is the conquest of difficulties and the overthrow of impediments to the milder appetite.

A detailed treatment of these two sense appetites is proper matter for the second volume of this work. Here it will be enough merely to catalogue them. Thus, from the mild appetite there spring such fundamental inclinations as: love and its opposite, hate; desire and aversion, relative to an absent good or evil; and delight and sorrow, the first of which is rest in the possession of good, the second, repugnance to the presence of evil. From the emergency appetite come hope and despair, daring and fear. and, finally, anger. It is sufficient, for the purposes of this volume, to note the distinction of these appetites and the common source of all the inclinations in the fundamental ones of love and hate. The whole subject of the passions of man, that is, of the movements of the sense appetite, is taken up in exhaustive detail in the next volume.

Its relation to reason and will

None of these are evidences of intellectual appetite. In fact, there very often is sharp conflict between the intellectual appetite and these sensual appetites as many a man can testify when, holding desperately to his moment of high resolve, he refuses a cigarette though his mouth is watering for it, our attitude towards this conflict of appetites raging within us is a penetrating indication of the interrelation of these appetites; the fact is, we are not neutrals, not even belligerent neutrals, we are intensely interested in seeing the intellectual appetite come out on top. Thus, when a man becomes violently angry he is “beside himself”; a man is “crazy with pain,” “paralyzed by fear,” and so on; that is, these sensual appetites have usurped complete control with the result that this man is no longer a man, he is not himself, he is, for the moment, an animal. We naturally expect the sense appetites to be subjects in the kingdom of man; wizen they are not, their victim is in the grip of animal appetites, the supreme motive power of his actions is not that distinctly human appetite that is will, but one of its subjects.

These sense appetites do, as a matter of fact, obey reason and will. Normally we do not fly from evil as a sheep does from a wolf, in blind panic; we do not run in out of the rain as a cat does. We might even deliberately stay out in the rain for reasons that never occur to a cat. The movements of our sense appetites are not the instinctive reactions of an animal; when they are, we do not boast of them, we are ashamed. They are made to follow the reasoning of an intellectual being; that is what we mean by self-control and why we are rather proud of it as evidence of our more thorough humanity, of our having lived up to ourselves.

Not that the sense appetites always obey reason. Anger can flare up so suddenly as to take control in a surprise rebellion; animal love can gnaw away the foundations of resistance so slowly and imperceptibly that the fort caves in on its defenders when at last they rush to the defense. The soul has an utterly despotic control over the members of the body that move at its command; a hand or a foot does not rebel against the soul’s orders to move. But the reason and will exercise only a kind of political control over the sense appetites; these latter can rebel, and they do.

The reason for this difference is fairly obvious. The members of the body are executing faculties, they fulfill orders; of themselves they have no sovereignty, no power of movement. But the sense appetites have a kind of sovereignty of their own. They are made to move at the command of man’s deliberate will; but they are also moved by sense objects and phantasms of the imagination. A man can awaken chagrined at having his dream-banquet interrupted by an alarm clock before he had taken a bite, or he can awaken with a sigh of intense relief at escaping the horrors of a nightmare; and all this, after he had tucked his mind away for the night in, the heavy blankets of sound sleep.

Of his intellectual appetite — the fact of it

Man has his own substantial form to which responds his natural appetite; he has the sensible, particular forms gathered by sense knowledge to which his sense appetite responds; and, finally, he becomes all things, he possesses the forms of all being, by his intellectual knowledge and to this his intellectual appetite or will jumps to answer. Again, this appetite, like all appetite, deals with good, that alluring perfection that spurs to action or that, once possessed, quiets the clamors of appetite. But, since it follows the universal, intellectual knowledge of man, its proper object is that universal good that is known by the intellect. It can, of course, reach out for any particular good; but only the universal, the supreme good is worthy of its mightiest efforts and this alone quiets all the will’s desires.

The nature of man’s will: Universality of its object

Good in general, or, to give it another name, what fulfils desire, happiness, is the adequate object of the will. By its very nature, the will must march under this standard. Absolutely nothing can be done precisely under the aspect of evil; the murderer must see his crime as somehow good, the lonely schoolgirl must get some good out of her prolonged homesickness or there would be no murders and no blues. Whatever the particular goal to which the will runs, it must be painted in the colors of happiness; once a set goal is chosen, then the means necessarily connected with that goal take on some of its necessity and must be willed. If a man sees happiness in wealth, in pleasure or in God, then the things necessarily leading to wealth, to God or to pleasure cannot be objectionable to him, they cannot take second place until the goal itself has been changed. To put it in the concrete, it is impossible for a man to commit mortal sin without abandoning God as his ultimate happiness and final goal; that is precisely the terrible tragedy of mortal sin, that it does involve abandoning God for some glimmer of His beauty in the pool of the world.

Necessary objects

Over and above this natural and absolute necessity of willing our end, our perfection, the necessity which is the starting point of all voluntary action and which is itself entirely agreeable to the will, there is another necessity to which the will is entirely subject. A graphic statement of this necessity is seen in the willingness with which a man abandons his wardrobe in order to escape from a burning hotel. The necessity is, of course, hypothetical; he could have remained on guard protecting his clothes until he was burned to a cinder, but if he wanted to live, the clothes had to be left behind. Undoubtedly there is an element of unwillingness in this; but, at the same time, there is a very complete Willingness; he does not make his exit from the flaming hotel like a sulky boy but like a scared cat. He willed this particular end of escape, and, willing that, he necessarily willed all that was involved in the task of escaping, even to the abandonment of a hard-won wardrobe.

Free objects: The nature of freedom

There is something of this element of unwilling willingness in man’s embrace of any particular good, for one can not be had without the exclusion of others; it is only in the embrace of the infinite good that a man abandons all else and gains everything, only in that supreme good is every other good to be found. Experience is witness enough, however, that the note of reluctance is not a serious impediment to man’s choice from the glittering counters of goodness. In both the natural and the hypothetical necessity, there is a thorough voluntariness that tones down the strong, severe lines of necessity’s stern face. In coercive necessity, the necessity of brute force, sternness is changed to savagery. There is nothing here to attract the will. Yet, for all that, it is a puny thing; for neither is there in it anything strong enough to bend the fragile will of the weakest of men. A man can be beaten to a pulp, tossed into a gangster’s automobile, hustled into a concentration camp or even nailed to a cross; he cannot be forced to will these things. For one of the mysteriously strongest things about the human will is that it cannot be moved by any force in the world; there is an inherent impossibility in the notion of applying leverage to a spiritual thing and no one knows this better than a sinner. No one but himself and God knows how absurd is the plea that he has been forced to commit sin.

Freedom and necessity

Granted that there are some things that must be willed necessarily by a man, it is quite clear that not everything he chooses has been willed necessarily. In other words, man, in regard to some things, enjoys a gift unique in the physical world — the gift of freedom. Let it be well understood, however, that freedom here is not used in the same way in which it is proudly displayed today in such modern catchwords as “freedom of speech,” “freedom of the press” or “freedom of conscience.” Freedom does not mean the ability to do anything, say anything, believe anything; that is not freedom but freedom’s abuse. That this is an abuse and not freedom itself is readily recognized when the thing is brought down to the concrete; it is not freedom that allows an orator to harangue a crowd into committing adultery With this man’s wife; nor is it freedom in whose name newspaper advertisements and full powered propaganda urge men into an abuse of love and a flouting of nature; neither is it freedom’s privilege to undermine the very social structure without which men cannot live. Freedom does not mean that a man has been turned loose on the world, released from all order, all direction, from all purpose; that is not a privilege, it is a condemnation to a bestiality far surpassing the animality of the brutes.

Freedom and law

To apostles of license, every law is an insult to every individual citizen; every restriction is a cause for rebellion and men can live only so long as they have the physical force to maintain that life against all their fellows. Freedom, rightly understood, means no more than the right to choose between means to an end. There is no question of freedom relative to the end of man’s activities, just as there is no question of freedom relative to that end once it has been attained in heaven. Freedom is man’s badge of responsibility; it is a consecration to obligations rather than an exemption from all that demands courage and sweat and tears in its accomplishment. Freedom revolves entirely around the means to an end. Consequently the things that are not means, the things that lead a man away from his end rather than to it, have no place in the essential notion of liberty but in the description of its degradation and abuse. It is true that a man can commit murder, but that does not mean that he is free to murder; in committing his crime he is not exercising his liberty, he is abusing it.

For free will, like every other faculty of man, was given him that he might attain his full stature, his full perfection; that is, that by it he might attain his end. A deliberate aversion from that end is as revolting a perversion as the Epicureans’ resort to the vomitorium after a full meal. This faculty of will was not created to make a mockery of order but to make order’s perfect accomplishment a personal achievement.

Nevertheless it is true that freedom does denote the absence of necessity. Is it necessary that we have a choice between two objects? Does, for instance, the fact of my town possessing only one newspaper destroy my liberty relative to newspapers; or, if there is only one theatre in town, is my liberty done away with? Evidently if there are more than one newspaper or theatre, I am free to choose between the competing purveyors of news and amusement. But I am no less free even when there is only one: I can read or refuse to read, I can go to the theatre or stay at home; in other words, the fundamental liberty of acting or not acting remains. The theologians call this the liberty of exercise, in contrast to the liberty of specification which involves two or more objects; it is this liberty of exercise which is absolutely essential to freedom. This is the freedom that we enjoy before every act and even during that act; for always we have the power to stop willing. It is, then, not at all necessary that the choice between good and evil be offered a man if he is to retain his freedom; indeed, there is much more opportunity for freedom’s exercise when evil does not enter into the picture at all, much less chance for it when evil is rampant.

As an immediate consequence of this we are driven to a sane view of law. For in this light, law is not an infringement of liberty but rather a guarantee and protector of it; the Ten Commandments, for example, ruling out the things that draw us away from our end, do not destroy the material of liberty but concentrate our attention upon it. A police force which effectively operates against crime, protects liberty. License, unrestricted action in whatever field, be it license of the press, of the radio, of speech, of morals, is the most serious menace liberty has to face; for license not merely abuses the freedom of the one guilty of it, it directly and immediately interferes with the freedom of others, preventing their steady progress to their end by their free choice.

Proofs of freedom

If this freedom of men were being attacked by some jealous race that did not possess the gift itself, such an attack might be understandable. But when men themselves are eager to deny this faculty, when they battle with all the energy of fanatic strength, with all the ingenuity that can be commanded by wealth, educational advantages and institutions to champion the abuse of this gift, then we are facing a perversion that outdoes the excesses of paganism. Today it is extremely necessary to defend the freedom of man from a vast army of intellectuals in America. What proof have we of freedom?

From the nature of human knowledge — proximate source of freedom

The immediate source of man’s freedom is to be found in the intellectual character of his knowledge. By this knowledge, man is the only spectator on earth of the drama of the universe; he can enter into the inmost nature of everything else and he can step outside of himself, his is not the provincial view of the animals, but the cosmopolitan outlook that knows values and their limitations because it has the material for comparison. All appetite follows in the steps of knowledge and is proportionate to it, for appetite of itself is necessarily blind. All the universe moves to a goal: some of its creatures with slow, plodding steps in the dark, guided by the knowledge of the governor of the universe; others move from object to object as the flashlight of sense knowledge lights up the beauty of this sensible thing and leaves the rest clothed in the darkness of mystery; but men, with the floodlight of intelligence lighting up the whole scene see clearly the obstacles of evil, the helps of particular goods, but over and above they see the goal to which they race. The appetite proportioned to this intellectual knowledge can be satisfied with none of the attractions of the roadside stands; it drives on to the goal of all, the universal good that only man can know.

To look at it from another angle, the fact that we can know the universal enables us to appreciate the limitation, which is to say the imperfection, of the particular. We can see the good in the particular and take it to ourselves; or, seeing its limitation, its undesirability, we can pass it by. It is precisely this limitation of everything less than the supreme good that makes it as impossible for the particular goods to force the will as it is for a thimbleful of water to fill a twelve-gallon pail. It is only a good without limitation, without weak points, without undesirability that is proportioned to the will; only this is an adequate object, only this can move the will necessarily. Faced with anything less, the will is free.

The moral argument

On the moral side, an obvious argument for freedom is offered by several commonplace facts. Clearly, it is silly to fine a man for speeding if he is not the driver at all, but one driven by necessity. It is a stupid gesture to reward bravery if courage is merely the violent interaction of chemical reagents. It is absurd to exhort man to control his passions, to strive for goals, to hold fast to ideals if in all this he has no choice. In other words, the advice, counsels, exhortations, commands, rewards, punishments, the whole juridical process presuppose the freedom of man.

In fact, the whole question of morality and moral standards is irrational without the fact of freedom. If a moral law means anything, it means a law that does not force but obliges, a law whose subjects are capable of violating it in contrast to the subjects of a physical law. A legislature does not rule on the size of the ears of subjects, though it does insist on the payment of taxes. A modern philosopher, insisting that man is an animal, a chemical or a machine and at the same time talking of right and wrong, decent and indecent, noble and disgraceful is stultifying himself; the college student, accepting the principles of such teaching, is doing the rational thing when he throws all morality overboard.

From conscience

A much more intimate proof of our freedom comes from the undeniable fact of our realization of that freedom, from the testimony of psychological conscience. Before a man lights a cigarette, he knows he does not have to light it; while he is smoking, he is sure he can stop at any time; when the smoke is all over and done with, the conviction of his freedom remains. He knows he has not been pushed about by cosmic forces. A man knows he is guilty of wrong because he is so sure he could have done right; he knows this thing should be done here and now, but he is just as sure that he can refuse to do it.

Nor is he an eccentric, queer and lonely in his eccentricity. The same convictions are quite universal among men. Consequently, when a criminal pleads for mercy on the grounds that he could not help committing his crime, he is actually advancing a plea of insanity, at least of temporary insanity. A professor can hold forth on the theory that the heritage of society dictates human action or that neurones or reflex arcs are the real movers; but he will probably report to the college authorities any student who laughs aloud or strolls out in the middle of the lecture.

Argument from the divine government of universe — radical source of freedom

There is, finally, the proof of freedom from the beauty, the order of the divine government of the universe. Everything else in nature is moved according to its particular nature; a cat never barks, nor does a tree bite. Why, then, should man be the sole exception? Why should man be moved like a thing that is not human when he has human nature? Why should he not be moved in the human fashion, that is, freely? Why should man be subject to the necessary movement that regulates those whose knowledge is limited to the particular or which have no knowledge at all, when he has a universal horizon that is an image of the divine horizon? Why should his appetite, capable of the universal. the supreme, be forced to desire what is so plainly imperfect? In other words, as we saw in the chapter on the divine will, God is the radical source of our freedom by His divine government of the universe; we are free because the power of His will reaches out to all that is real, not merely to the creature, not merely to the action, but also to the mode in which that action is placed, to its freedom or its necessity. The first mover, when it is a question of moving man, moves him according to his human nature — freely.

An interesting point comes up here indicating the power of a lie if it is big enough and told often enough. Of recent years, it has become the fashion to look upon modern philosophers and educators as the champions of man while the Church is considered a reactionary enemy of all that is wholesomely human. Yet, if one were to run down the list of truths that every Catholic must hold as infallibly true, he would find such things as this: man is a creature of body and soul, his intellect is valid, it can certainly know truth, his will is free, he is in command of his life, one might well wonder — who is my neighbor?

Relations of will and intellect

The interrelation of intellect and will is a matter to be unraveled at length in the second volume of this work It must, however, be mentioned here because the intimacy of their interaction is obvious from what has been said; and the fact of that interaction presents the mind with a difficulty that cannot be slurred over. Since every appetite is blind and follows the steps of knowledge, evidently the will depends on the intellect for the object of its movement; a man cannot, for example, desire God as his supernatural happiness until God is known to him by faith. Yet the will is the principle of all movement in man, so that the intellect moves to its considerations under the motion of the will; it is entirely up to the girl herself whether she will consider her big feet and be downcast or her pert nose and be considerably cheered.

Mutual movement

The will cannot move until the intellect has shed its light, yet the intellect is moved by the will; certainly, this has the appearance of a vicious circle. Really, there is nothing vicious about it. The circle is broken by the admission of the obvious truth that the movement of one or the other must be first; granted that first movement, their interaction goes merrily on. That first movement is from the intellect, for it is fundamental that we must know what we are to desire. What moves the intellect to its first consideration? That first movement must come from an outside agent; and the only outside agent who can act directly on the soul is God.

Mutual superiority

In his comparative estimate of these two faculties, St. Thomas considers the intellect the nobler, at least in the abstract and in the perfect state of heaven. His reasons are solid. From the point of view of their objects, it is clear that the object of the intellect is more simple, more abstract; which is to say that the intellect’s object is less tainted with particularity, and has, therefore, less of limitation, of imperfection about it. From the angle of man’s goal, which is the beatific vision, the direct, intuitive knowledge of Cod, the nobility of the intellect stands out boldly; for the perfection of man, like the perfection of anything else, consists in the highest act of his highest faculty. The enjoyment or fruition of God, the will’s part in man’s happiness, comes by way of consequence, it is a kind of corollary of that beatific vision.

In this life the action of the will may well be more noble than the action of the intellect by reason of the very nature of their objects. For truth, the object of the intellect, is in the intellect, while good, the object of the will, is in things. The practical consequences of this fact are momentous. Thus, St. Thomas could be an angel of purity while possessing an expert knowledge of impurity; a detective can have an exhaustive knowledge of methods of robbery and still be an honest man. In other words, the intellect takes everything in on its own level. What we know exists in us in our way, whether it be worms or God; knowledge does not elevate or degrade us, rather it levels things to the one human plane.

The will, on the contrary, does not take things into itself; it goes out to things. We become what we desire. If that be infinitely above us, we are lifted out of ourselves to that superior height; if it be beneath us, we are dragged down to the level of what we crave. If we place our goal in God, we soar to divine heights; if we revel in the pleasures of the animals, we are dragged down to the mire of animal existence and further, for we can think of ways of being more animal than the animals.

Conclusion: Facts of man’s appetite

From this survey of the appetites of man we can understand that these appetites do upset the pretty pattern of uniformity modern philosophy has pieced together. They are disturbing factors in the universe and in individual life; they always will be. In fact, they are supposed to be. They are planned by the divine architect as restless springs of action that would allow a man rest only when the walls of heaven had been stormed and divine life itself shared. The aim of life and of the universe is not dull stagnation but high attainment; and these appetites are the motive forces driving us on to that high goal.

Our sensual appetites are not a den of iniquity nor a holy of holies. It is as much of an injustice to man to look upon these appetites as gods to be honored in clouds of incense as it is to throw up our hands in horror and view them as unclean things. They are neither one nor the other; they are the very homely, very human equipment of that image of God which is man. They are capable of great heights and equally capable of great depths — but only at the instigation of a higher authority which alone is to be blamed or praised.

That higher authority is the deliberate will of man; a source of terrific potentialities and responsibilities, opening up terrifying prospects of failure, driving on to actions that only a courageous human heart could dare to try. But it is also the source of sacrifice, of the extravagance of love, of success, of virtue, of heaven. By that will God can be ours, but by it, too, we can throw in our lot with Satan.

A disturbing fact in the universe

The human will is a disturbing fact in the universe. perhaps because it is the supreme Fact. The crowned head can never rest easy; a subject world, whether within or without man, always holds possibilities of rebellion. But it is precisely this deliberate will that gives man dominion over the whole of creation, including himself. It is the key link in that beautifully forged chain of being that stretches from the crudest form of existence up through the glory of the angels to the splendor that is God.

A disturbing fact in human life

Of course it is a disturbing fact in human life. It is a constant reminder that we are human; and sometimes that comes hard. It would seem so much easier to look on our selves as machines, to lose ourselves in the dreamy softness of emotionalism, to let down the barriers to animalism very easy, very weak, and very cowardly. But if it is a constant goad driving us on to be worthy of our humanity, it is also a constant defense against the horror of despair and the filth of license. It boldly stamps all of human activity with the human trademark — “mine”; the mark of control, of proprietorship, of pride as well as of responsibility.

The human will is disturbing for it makes us full sharers in the divine perfection: capable of knowing and acting as God does, through intellect and will; of sharing in the work of divine providence as no other member of the physical universe shares, completing that image of God in the physical universe. We alone, of all these creatures. have the power to rise to direct possession of God, For we alone, of all these creatures, have the power to rise in open rebellion against that God and continue in that rebellion for eternity.

CHAPTER XV — THE MIND OF THE LORD OF THE WORLD
(Q. 84-89)

1. The puzzle of heights and depths.

    (a) Natures bases for mystery of knowledge.

    (b) Pertinence of the problem of knowledge.

2. Modernity and the problem:

    (a) History of the modern view.

    (b) Position of the moderns.

3. The defense of knowledge.

4. The nature of knowledge:

    (a) Its characteristics: immaterial, immutable, universal, necessary.

    (b) Its source:

               (1) Negatively.

               (2) Positively from sensible things.

    (c) Its manner and medium:

               (1) Abstraction

               (2) The results of abstraction — the intelligible species.

    (d) The order of knowledge.

    (e) The accuracy of knowledge.

5. The objects of knowledge:

    (a) In the sensible world.

    (b) In the soul.

    (c) Above the soul.

6. Knowledge in separated souls:

    (a) Distinction from earthly knowledge.

    (b) Objects of this knowledge.

Conclusion:

  1. The shock of the problem.

  2. Significance of the answer:

    (a) Relative to the universe.

    (b) Relative to human action.

    (c) Relative to participation in divinity.

CHAPTER XV THE MIND OF THE LORD OF THE WORLD (Q. 84-89)

The puzzle of heights and depths

MOUNTAIN climbing and deep-sea diving appeal to only a sporting few among men. There is a considerable danger in each, increased, perhaps, by the hint each carries of the tragic character of extreme height or depth to the human individual. He knows if he goes down deep enough he will be crushed by outside pressure; and if he goes up high enough he may suffocate from lack of oxygen before he explodes from lack of outside pressure, but suffocation is small comfort. Indeed, it is probably the element of comfort rather than the fear of danger that keeps most men on the prosaic level of smooth earth. Whatever can be said of the thrill of heights and depths neither can compare in sheer comfort with a sleepy street on a summer evening or a soft chair and a warm fire on a wintry night.

The most comfort-loving man cannot dodge all heights and depths; but he can dislike them wherever he meets them. Usually that dislike is prompt and unmistakable. Even though we have stepped into an express elevator of our own free will, its almost instantaneous plunge down thirty stories leaves us with a sense of incredulousness and blurred fright. It is not so much a matter of danger or discomfort as it is that we have simply come down too fast; we are not built on the express model, we labor up step by step and come down even more cautiously. Our minds work that way, our wills work that way and, as far as we can arrange it, all the details of life follow the same pattern. Put our arrangements are by no means sufficient to cover the whole span of life. With no warning whatsoever, we look into the eyes of another and suddenly realize there has been a mutual plunging into the depths of a human soul: we are numbed and stumble away in a kind of dazed unbelief. Genius may labor over stubborn material for hours on end, then suddenly there is a Hashing insight that sends the mind into the heights like a frightened angel scurrying home; even genius is slightly dazed, incredulous, though its disbelief be hidden in a competent silence.

If we look down from the heights through the window of a speeding plane, railroads, ships, cities and forests look like toys; they can hardly be real — again that note of dazed disbelief. If you can picture a man getting that same view without moving a foot off the ground, you have some idea of his incredulousness before the fact of his own knowledge. His mind puts him off to one side of the universe, or above it, giving him a plane passenger’s view of the whole as if he were no part of it. Without any warning, that human mind plunges past the surface of men and things down to the very depths to reveal, not something about men and things, but men and things themselves; and in a fraction of time that defies analysis with an absence of intervening steps that jars us out of our apathetic plodding. It is no wonder that this thing of knowledge has been a prime problem for philosophers from the beginning; it is no wonder that they have approached the problem in a somewhat sour humor, irritated, almost angry at the speed, the mystery, the heights and depths of it.

Nature’s bases for mystery of knowledge

Moreover, the problem has an immediate and crucial interest for every individual. For if it is true that appetite must follow knowledge, then it is precisely because of this mysterious, far sweeping, universal knowledge of man that human appetite surpasses that of the animals. It is because man can search the heights and the depths that he can be satisfied only by the supreme good. It is, then, the universal, abstract knowledge of man that is the immediate source and explanation of his freedom in the face of limited, imperfect goods; it is this distinctly human knowledge that gives him dominance over the physical world and himself; it is this that ultimately explains the responsibilities of human life, the possibilities of personal success and failure, of victory and defeat, of moral life and its ultimates of heaven and hell as being within reach of human activity. In a word, it is because man has a distinctly human knowledge that he has distinctly human desires and so distinctly human acts; that human life lies on a plane just below the angels and far above the brute world of matter. This, then, is no mere academic problem, this problem of knowledge; it is not to be shrugged off but to be painstakingly investigated.

Modernity and the problem: History of the modern view

It is not strange that the philosophy of our day has lost no share of the universal interest in the problem of knowledge. What is surprising is that the activity of modern philosophy should be centered chiefly in denying the humanity of man’s knowledge rather than in trying to explain it. But the fact is plain. This opposition to the humanity of man’s knowledge is one of the chief grounds for the rejection of the scholastic answer to the problem — the so-called naive notion of the scholastics that the knowledge of man exceeds the content of sense knowledge yet takes its rise from the senses and the sensible world. The moderns have rejected one or the other of these two elements or the conjunction of the two. one school will insist that the world of sense is a world of illusions, it is the mind that we are projecting and playing with when we play the game of knowing the world about us; the other completely disregards intellectual activity, or tries to, reducing such activity to the world of the sensible, automatic, blind, instinctive forces. In this way the heights and the depths, the mystery and speed and all the rest are done away with by the simple expedient of blowing up the sensible world or of strangling the mind of men; quite a high price to pay for the comfort of level territory.

Position of the moderns

The technique of escape from the problem of knowledge is by no means new. It was tried when philosophy was young and many a time since; still the world goes on and the minds of men go on. But a man who is trying to run away is not to be discouraged by previous failures; inevitably the technique would be tried again. The modern attempt can trace its intellectual roots to the beginning of the modern era when Descartes assumed his artificial chasm between the mind and the world of reality, an assumption that forced him to build the fantastic bridge of totally unwarranted parallelism. A fantastic bridge to span an assumed chasm seems fair enough; but men took it seriously.

Kant gave this assumption a philosophical flavor by apparently justifying it, when, with typical modern clumsiness, he rushed to the “rescue” of the humanity of man’s knowledge against the positivistic attacks of Locke, Berkely and Hume. The rescue was effected by murdering the victim. Kant proceeded by assuming that what is not given formally in experience comes wholly from the mind; such an unqualified statement as “sugar is sweet” is obviously not given formally in experience for all sugar cannot be experientially tested for its sweetness, so the statement must take its rise wholly from the mind. Both of these elements of Kant’s original assumption were then developed independently to their logical conclusion of naturalism and idealism. The problem of knowledge was escaped again by the same technique of denying or disregarding one or the other of its constituent elements, the world or the mind. Still there were the stubborn facts remaining unexplained: both the world and the mind refused to be snubbed.

Coming down closer to our own day, Bergson made a polite gesture towards intellect as he stabbed it in the back by his contention that the intellect was not an instrument of valid knowledge and reality was so fluid a thing that it could not be known without being stopped in its flow and so falsified. The result was that we had neither a worth-while mind nor a world with which we could come into contact. The intellect of man was not a valid investigator of the world of reality; it was a falsifier, a maker of useful (not true) concepts whose whole purpose was action. William James accepted the Bergsonian gesture with open arms, developed his Pragmatism (or disregard of truth in favor of utility), thus turning a valid scientific method of inquiry into an immensely popular and thoroughly worthless system of philosophy.

Today we reap the fruits of this wild sowing. For it is our age that has come sharply up against the express attempt at a thorough invalidation of the intellect and its activity or even a downright denial of the existence of the intellect. That means that we are heed with a denial of human knowledge, with all the consequences of such a denial for philosophy, science, human activity and human life. We are the victims of a modern “rescue” of men by modern “champions” of man’s humanity.

The defense of knowledge

In an earlier chapter, it was shown that the Church had been forced to come to the rescue of the humanity of the very nature of man and to defend the freedom of human action. The same is true of man’s knowledge. Just as the Church insisted that man was human, not animal, not angelic, not divine; just as she insisted he was master of his own actions, not the slave of blind forces within or without himself; so she insists on the humanity of his knowledge, the validity of his intellects. Man’s knowledge is not the mere sense knowledge of the animals, it is not the innately perfect knowledge of the angels, it is not the sum total of all knowledge as is God’s; it is the knowledge proportionate to human nature, to a spiritual soul informing a material body — a rational knowledge taking its rise from the senses and the world of the senses.

The nature of knowledge

In this matter, the difference between these two, both claiming championship of man, is that the one not only admits the existence of the spiritual, it sees the spiritual, not as something extraordinary, not as supernatural, but as an integral part of the natural order; the other, impressed by the vividness, the size, the multiplicity and the constancy of the sensible world and sense impressions, cannot tear its eyes away from this fascinating part of nature and so can see nothing else. The nature of man is a startling thing in the universe; it is a fusion of the material and the spiritual, the link binding together the spiritual and material world. But man is not, from that fact, a supernatural creature, a freak in nature, an upstart that must be reduced to a lower level. His knowledge, too, is a startling thing, taking its rise in the physical world and reaching to spiritual heights that far surpass anything in the world beneath man; but it is not, from that fact, an unnatural, preternatural or supernatural phenomenon, it is not to be treated as necessarily an illusion or an absurd paradox that defies understanding. It is entirely natural; and quite naturally it possesses such spiritual characteristics as immateriality, immutability, universality and necessity.

Its characteristics: immaterial, immutable, universal, necessary.

A man’s knowledge of a stone, a tree or another man immediately leaps far ahead of the particular notes of this stone, this tree or this man and presents the knower with a concept that is universally valid, one true of all stones, another true of all trees, another true of all men. It is coin of the realm of truth that is accepted even in eternity. It is not only universal, it is as necessarily stable as the natures of those things known, because it is precisely those natures that are known. As long as a circle cannot have its nature changed and still be a circle, as long as man remains man, that is, as long as the essences of things cannot be falsified, this knowledge remains immutable.

That knowledge exists in a spiritual soul, in the immaterial faculty of intellect, in the only way in which it can exist there; that is, freed from the limitations of matter. It outstrips the contingency, the changeableness, the singularity of the physical world, taking on the characteristics of the spiritual world, yet faithfully representing the world with which it brings a man into immediate contact. There is indeed truth in the concepts of wetness, of beauty and of humanity; though it is not wetness but wet things, not beauty but beautiful things, not humanity but humans that have physical existence in the sensible world.

Its source: Negatively

Yet, in spite of its decidedly spiritual nature, it is a serious error to trace this knowledge to any but a source proportionate to that composite nature that is man’s. Certainly we do not know things, as God does, by simply looking at ourselves, knowing our own essence. A concentrated and exclusive study of ourselves may teach us some surprising things, but the number of things it will not teach us is positively staggering; and, if we continue this one-sided study long enough, we shall end up by not even knowing ourselves. We are men, not gods. We could know all things in our own souls only if the things existed there beforehand to be known. They do exist in God, the divine exemplar, the model to which all things were made. We have only the norm proper to our nature, the substantial form which is our spiritual soul; it has the capacity to receive unlimited forms of other things by way of knowledge, but only the capacity. A savage of Tierra del Fuego can search his soul from now until doomsday, go into a very trance of introspection, and never come up with the knowledge of an automobile. In other words, we cannot know all things by simply knowing ourselves because we are not the cause of all things.

To a man whom the Lord has delivered up to study, the story of Catherine of Siena receiving profound knowledge through a miraculous infusion of ideas has an appeal that may well be tinged with envy. Not an hour of study went into her knowledge, no single difficulty kept her mind in turmoil for weeks, no book wore down her eyes, no error shook her judgment. Think of it! But do not think of it as the ordinary mode of acquiring human knowledge; that is the way the angels get their knowledge and men are not angels. It hardly seems necessary to argue the point, yet some men have been captivated by the joyous ease of innate ideas and argued that so men knew the world. If this were true, we would never be potential knowers for we would have our knowledge from the beginning. Then, too, there would be the insurmountable difficulty facing us, namely, that men born blind cannot know color and men born deaf cannot know sound. It might also be pointed out as somewhat strange that all men should forget all they naturally know.

Positively — from sensible things

Our knowledge does not come pouring into our heads from some outside source such as Plato’s separated ideas. Any teacher will testify that nothing can be poured into a student’s head, nor even hammered in; the student has to reach out and feed his own mind. As a matter of fact, in such an hypothesis there would be no excuse whatever For man having a body; it would be at best an obstacle and at worst a prison, rather than the essential constituent of his very nature.

Its manner and medium

The strongest argument against these dreams of easy human knowledge is the facts which clearly indicate that our knowledge takes its rise from sensible things. The apprenticeship of childhood is an absolute requirement for the mastery of adult knowledge. The sensible world acts upon our senses giving rise to that sense knowledge we have in common with the animals, writing its permanent record in the phantasms or images of the imagination. So far sense knowledge carries us and no farther. It is the gay knowledge of children, full of vivid colors, rippling sounds, swift movement, delicious odors and lingering tastes with none of the animal’s fear to tone down its gaiety.

Abstraction

From this highest level of sense knowledge, intellectual knowledge takes its rise. That transition from the sensible to the intellectual, however, is not made simple by saying it quickly; it represents difficulties that have been too much for many a philosopher. For the phantasm is sensible, particular, concrete; moreover, no sensible thing can act on a spiritual substance, cannot bump it, squeeze it, tickle its fancy, or take it by the throat. How, then, explain the immaterial, universal, necessary concept in the spiritual intellect coming from such a sources.

Admittedly men start off with their minds a blank page; such knowledge as we have, short of a miracle, must take its rise from the senses. It is also unquestionably true that everything in the world of experience is singular and concrete, not universal; while our knowledge is obviously universal. Yet St. Thomas denies that the universals are wholly from the mind, as Kant would have it. That denial is precisely the refusal to admit an identification of “what is not given formally in experience” with “wholly of the mind.” Much that we know is not given formally in experience, such a prosaic thing, for example, as the sweetness of sugar; but this does not make it wholly a product of mind. The universality of man’s knowledge has some root in the concrete, singular world of experience.

The specific nature of this dog is the same as that of another dog or, indeed, of all dogs. It is precisely the common nature enjoyed by all dogs which makes this creature a dog and not a horse. In technical language, this means that the specific nature, or essence, of the concrete thing is negatively universal. The scholastics called this ratio or absentia; let us use a word with which we are now familiar and call it a form. It is differentiated in each dog by individual elements, the elements that contribute the “thisness” of the particular dog. This form of a sensible thing cannot exist in the physical world without individuating elements supplied by matter — a fact that experience forces on our mind; we are not chased by a universal dog or introduced to universal human nature. But it is evident that the specific form itself is not averse to universality; it does, as a matter of fact, exist in many dogs at the same time.

To have this form in its universality, then, means no more than to have it without the individual elements matter has given it; the universal form does exist fundamentally in things. Can it be unearthed in some way from particularity, from the “thisness” of the concrete things. This is the work of the intellect, by the process of abstraction, to make formally universal what was only fundamentally or potentially so.

Since scholasticism has been put in the stocks, this process has become famous; it is one of the missiles most frequently hurled at the hapless scholastic head. All rumors to the contrary, it is not a surgical operation cutting apart the individual and universal elements; it is not a matter of slapping a universal tag on a patently concrete thing at our own subjective pleasure or necessity.

Abstraction is in no sense a separation; it is simply a distinct consideration of the form to the disregard of the particularity of this thing, somewhat as a man might regard the redness of an apple without consideration of its sweetness, or the softness of soap-suds without regard to their taste. It is the same trick mathematics uses in considering quantity without regard to beauty; or that art uses in considering beauty without regard to the mathematician’s quantity. Obviously the scholastics have taken out no patent on the process.

We have a faculty of intellect, called the active intellect, whose sole work is to throw light on the sensible image or phantasm to make the universal stand out from the particular as a spot-light makes one girl stand out from a chorus. This light, focused on the specific nature in the phantasm, enables the intellect to concentrate on its proper objects the universal nature of the thing, to the disregard of the particularizing elements of it.

The results of abstraction — the intelligible species

The result of this distinct consideration, or this process of abstraction, is the intelligible species or form, representing the essence, ratio or form. More strictly, it is certainly not the universal nature existing in the mind in the same way as it exists outside; but it is the same nature existing in the mind in a different way. Whereas in the concrete thing, the dog, for instance, it exists physically, in the mind it exists intentionally; whereas in the dog it was only fundamentally universal, potentially intelligible, in the mind it is formally universal and actually intelligible.

The intelligible species or form is not a sheer luxury; it is indispensable for distinctly human knowledge. This concrete thing is certainly singular and our knowledge is just as certainly universal. If this concrete thing is ever to be known intellectually, it must be made actually universal, actually intelligible. Without such a universalization, the possible intellect (our other intellectual faculty) cannot produce the positive act of knowledge. Let us put it this way. Precisely because the possible intellect is capable of knowing all things, it is not determined to any one, just as the eye, because it is capable of seeing all colors, is not determined to any one. Without such determination there can be no knowledge, just as without some color there can be no sight. The determination of the intellect is by the intelligible species or form. Just as the form or essence gave the universal nature in the physical order resulting in the concrete dog, so it gives the universal nature in the intellectual order resulting in our knowledge of the dog. We might see the whole picture as a double sharing in the ideas of God: physically, in the order of existence, and intentionally, in the order of knowledge.

A common mistake that has turned many a philosopher against scholasticism centers upon the intelligible species. The notion has somehow got around that the scholastic is never in contact with the world: he knows an intelligible species, an idea, but not the world of reality. As a matter of fact, the intelligible species is not the object known; rather it is that by which we know the thing. It is not the object but the medium; just as light is not that which is seen but that by which color is seen, so the intelligible species is not that which is known but that by which a thing is known. We can, in fact, sail serenely through life without ever suspecting that we have a species, and be none the worse for it; but if we have no suspicion of possessing knowledge, we cannot sail through life, we shall have to be towed. It is only by the reflective, that is, the philosophic, consideration that we advert to the presence of species at all.

Nor does this make our knowledge exclusively universal, barring us forever from an intellectual knowledge of singular things. The direct object of our knowledge is the universal; the singular is no less an object, but it is seen indirectly, as we might see something from the corner of our eye without looking at it directly. It is, in fact, quite impossible for us to make use of any one of these intelligible species without adverting to the phantasm from which it was abstracted; so that in using any one we must indirectly, obliquely, consider the singular from which it arose. It is by direct intellectual knowledge that I know “man”; but it is also the fruit of intellectual operation that enables me to say “John Smith is a man.” The knowledge of the concrete individual “Smith” is intellectual, but indirectly so.

There is no chasm between the intellect and the sensible world; rather there is identity. To know is, in a sense, to become the thing known; it is to have ones own form physically and the forms of the known things intentionally. Knowledge is a vital action, not a mere passive reception or an automatic response. It is a union so intimate that we cannot so much as consider our act of knowledge without considering the object known; we do not know the act of our intellect knowing, but the act of the intellect knowing something.

The order of knowledge

As it starts off on the long, hard road of knowledge, the baby knows a puppy long before it recognizes the genus brute; for the first things we know are singular things, nos universals. Sense knowledge must come first, furnishing the material for intellectual knowledge; and sense knowledge is of particular, singular things. Really, the infant has some vague, blurred knowledge of things at rest, things in motion and things colored, before it begins to play with the puppy. It passes from the mere potentiality of knowledge to actual knowledge; the medium between those two extremes is imperfect or confused knowledge. Thus a man standing on a hill and peering down a long road will first see something approaching; then he will be able to distinguish it as some animal, then as some man and finally he will recognize the individual traveller. The process is the same if considered from the angle of the time element; the child will distinguish a man from other animals before it distinguishes one man from another. In the intellectual order, the same holds true: first we get the more general notion; and only as knowledge gets more perfect does it become less general.

Our progress is necessarily slow, step by step, because the door of our minds will not admit more than one intelligible species at a time; some one or the other may contain many interrelated notions, as one mirror may reflect a roomful of people, but the intellect can no more be actualized by different forms at the same time than a man can run in different directions at once. If we were to store this consideration of intellectual knowledge right here, we Would not have gone beyond what the scholastics call “simple apprehension,” that is, the knowledge of things immediately perceived through intelligible species.

Of course we cannot stop here; this is only the first of three steps. First we grasp the essences of things; then we compare these forms one with another, tack on or deny certain properties, accidents, habits, circumstances, a process that is called judgment, the fertile field of everyday mistakes; finally, a comparison of judgments gives us the act which has given its name to our type of intellectuality the act of reasoning and it is here that philosophers are weighed and, not infrequently, found wanting.

The accuracy of knowledge

Until we get past the simple apprehension of the essences of things, there is no chance for error in our knowledge. The healthy intellect can no more make a mistake about the essences of things than a healthy eye can about color or a healthy ear about sound. The essences of things are the proper object of the intellect, the reason for which it exists; it is made precisely to know them.

Error in judgment and reasoning is not only possible, it is a fairly common fact. At least, many people, other than ourselves, frequently make mistakes. Judgment and reasoning involve composition or division; we can and do put the wrong things together or refuse to put the right things together. There is truth in the concept of a grumbler, as there is truth in the concept of man; but it may, in this particular case, be totally unjust to judge that this man is a grumbler in other words, we cannot make a mistake about the essences of things but we can be mistaken about the properties, the accidents and the circumstances of this or that essence. The bases of our mistakes in judgment are much the same as the leases of our mistakes in conclusions, though the principles from which we argue be correct; that is, we make the comparison too quickly, without consideration, without grounds for such a union, or through prejudice rather than on evidence, and so on.

Some men do make more mistakes than others, if for no other reason than because some men do not understand as well as others. It is not merely a matter of better physical equipment, more apt organs of sense, keener imaginations and better memory; but because of a distinct difference in the quality of the intellect itself. We can improve our minds. But no bit of magic can change them from the tabloid class into the intellect of an Aristotle or a Thomas Aquinas.

The objects of knowledge

The field of knowledge thrown open by intellectual activity seems almost limitless in comparison with the feeble knowledge enjoyed by the animals. If we keep our eyes fixed on the brutes, we might be able to persuade our selves that there is no knowledge superior to our own. The fact is. however, that human knowledge has its limits; rather than approach the question from this deflating angle, let us inquire just what we do know.

In the sensible world

As we have seen, we know particular things indirectly with an intellectual knowledge, by a kind of reflection on the phantasm of the imagination. We know necessary things, like first principles, laws of the physical world; and contingent things, like grandmothers, and school days. We can even know some future things, like eclipses or next week’s blizzard; but we know these things, not in themselves, but in their causes as a man knows there is trouble in the offing from the scowl on his wife’s face. As for future things like a laugh, a sin, a yes or a no, they can only be guessed at by us at a great risk of having our guess turn out wrong. To see in themselves the future things that proceed from Free causes is not the prerogative of men but of God.

In the soul

We can know our own soul, its nature and faculties, not by meeting them on the street or by abstracting them from ourselves, but from the acts they produce. The acts, for instance, of the intellect and will are known by reflection: we know that we know by considering the act of knowing something; we know that we will by considering the act of willing something. This reflexive power is our special gift, a gift proper to intellectual nature alone; we are the only ones who can stand aside and look at ourselves and our acts critically, with an almost disinterested objectivity, as an angel might look at the earth.

Above the soul

Things above us, like the angels and God, because they are completely free of all material are evidently not the proportionate, natural, direct objects of our knowledge. There is no point to our standing on tiptoe trying to snatch them into our minds directly; we must be satisfied to learn about them the long, hard way, by reasoning up from the material world we know so well. In this way we can know them, not comprehensively, not directly but, as in the case of God, by tracing His effects for the clues they give us as to His nature, stripping off the imperfections of the created world to get a glimpse of the uncreated, attributing all perfection to the one possible source of that perfection. This was, in fact, the procedure we followed in the very beginning of this book in treating the nature of God.

Briefly, then, the direct object of human knowledge is the essences of things abstracted from singular, concrete things. From this basis, all judgment and reasoning proceed.

For a complete survey of the problem of knowledge there still remains the question of knowledge after death, for the soul of man does not die and it is precisely in the soul of man that his knowledge is centered. Separated from the body by death, the soul has lost its medium for investigation of the physical world, indeed of contact with that physical world. The helplessness of the soul seems even more striking when we remember that we cannot make use of a single intelligible species without referring to the phantasms of the imagination; and, of course, these phantasms cease to exist with death.

Still, this separated soul is the same soul with exactly the same nature it had before death, retaining possession of all the intelligible species amassed during life; it is consequently a rational soul, proceeding on the path of knowledge by that process of comparison which is judgment arid reasoning. To deprive an artist of color or a musician of all sound would be not nearly so tragic as to leave such a soul in a blank oblivion after death; it would be the most despairing, most frustrated of creatures. But how can it know?

Knowledge in separated souls

The answer to the difficulty is to be found in the fundamental truth that the mode of activity is determined by the mode of existence; thus the form of material things, when it enjoys a physical mode of existence, acts as the substantial form of a concrete thing, but when it enjoys an intentional mode of existence in the mind of man, it acts as the intelligible form of the intellect, causing knowledge. The separated soul has a different mode of existence than it enjoyed on earth; it exists without the body. con sequently, it should have a different mode of knowledge that, while not supernatural, is yet not the natural mode of knowledge of the soul when it is actually informing the body.

Distinction from earthly knowledge

The mode of existence the separated soul has is that proper to such separated spiritual substances as the angels. It therefore knows not only by the species gathered in life, using them as the angels use their concepts, but also by new species infused by God. Not that this new way of knowledge elevates the soul to a more perfect knowledge; in fact, this knowledge is inferior to that which was had and used by reference to the material part of man. The separated soul is like a little boy wearing his father’s clothes, or a street peddler sitting in on a conference of European diplomats. This soul is sporting its big brother’s mode of knowledge and is not quite capable of handling it.

The angels understand through fewer and more universal species, and quite perfectly; the soul, confronted by such a species, is like a man, totally ignorant of philosophy, forced to use the metaphysical principles of St. Thomas. He sees something in them, can make some use of them; but nothing like what St. Thomas could see in them and do with them. But precisely because these species are such angelic things, coming directly from God, they have the advantage of doing away with the necessity of physical contact with the sensible world, of being totally independent of distance, free of the necessity of reference to the phantasms of the imagination.

Objects of this knowledge

In that state of separation from the body, the souls know other souls, just as the angels do. They have some knowledge of all natural things, but rather a vague, confused knowledge; whereas the angels, with the same kind of species, have a perfect knowledge of all natural things. This confused character of the separated souls’ knowledge — due to the species being too big for them — also limits their knowledge of particular things to a blurred vision, as though their intellects could not quite focus. Evidently more determination must be had than is to be found in the species themselves if a clear, distinct knowledge of particular things is to be enjoyed; there must be some other force focusing the intellect to the point where the details stand out clearly, such a force, for instance, as some preceding knowledge, some bond of interest, of love, of natural inclination to this particular thing, or a special ordination of God.

As a result, souls separated from their proper bodies have no natural knowledge of what goes on on earth, They can know particular things clearly only through the determinations we have just mentioned; and such determinations cannot do away with the fact of separation from the physical world and the souls’ lack of natural contact with it. That the curtain which hides the doings of men might be drawn aside momentarily by a miracle is of course possible; that the blessed in heaven have a clear knowledge of the drama of earth supernaturally, through the essence of God, is quite true. But naturally speaking this is impossible to the soul after death.

Looking out over the vista of human knowledge, we can understand something of the dazed unbelief, the frightened incredulity of modern philosophers. The thing is a distinct shock; it goes up too high, down too deep. and with a speed that jars us out of the plodding pace of the material world. It is even a little irritating in its mysterious intangibility. The temptation is to sulk a little. like a man who sees something that simply cannot have happened but nonetheless does; he will not quite admit it, though he cannot deny it without admitting to himself that he is stubbornly fighting the facts.

Conclusion: The shock of the problem

The shock of human knowledge falls principally on the man who has focused all his attention on one part of the universe and made it impossible for himself to see the smooth harmony of the whole. He has studied the material side so expertly and intensely that he eventually becomes convinced that nothing else exists or can exist. It is almost too much to ask him to see the light of intellectuality as a great sun with rays streaming from it, for such a figure demands a view of the whole of the universe, not merely a part of it. Thus, in the very center, all things are understood by the one flaming sun itself, God knowing through His own essence; as we get further away from that center, the light becomes dimmer, less penetrating. The angels understand through a few of these powerful rays, and perfectly; man, as the rays get dimmer, needs many to light the way and then only imperfectly: finally, on the level of brute and inanimate creation, the light dies out altogether and things must be steered through the darkness by the hand of God.

To take the same universal view from the other side, we see the creatures which work towards their perfection and that of the universe without knowledge of their own, but solely through the impress of the knowledge of God. Up a step we have the animals seeking their limited ends through a particular knowledge of the senses which precludes freedom; man stretches forth to his infinite goal through the universal knowledge of intellect, seeing the goal and each step towards it, but laboriously, step by step, with many an error; the angels dart to the same infinite goal easily, naturally, perfectly with a complete and infallible knowledge; God Himself is that goal, knowing Himself, possessing Himself by His very essence.

Significance of the answer: Relative to the universe

No, man s intellectual knowledge is not a freak in a physical universe; it is but another strip in the film unfolding the beauty and perfection of God, a corner of a blueprint which fits perfectly into the universal plan of the divine architect, a link in the chain that binds the meanest of creatures to the absolute perfection of God. Intellectual knowledge is not a freak but a demand of the humanity of man, the rightful trappings of his state as lord of the physical world, sharer in divine providence with the divine ability of looking ahead, considering his goals, providing for himself and for others in that kingdom.

Relative to human action

This human knowledge, because it is so intimately a part of man himself, is an indispensable condition for human activity, intellectual or otherwise. Without that universal, necessary, immaterial knowledge, the physical sciences, philosophy and the arts are impossibilities; without that knowledge of absolute, universal truth there can be no freedom, no morality, no striving for heaven, no ultimate union with God for eternity. Only the possessors of intellectuality survive the inevitable death which stalks the physical universe. Only those who can know the wide stretches of the immaterial can taste eternal life With its eternal vision; all else must pass.

Relative to participation in divinity

It is only those who defend that intellectuality of man who can be counted among the friends of man and of truth; for only these are ready to face facts and to take up the burdens and privileges of humanity. Only those who accept the guidance of that intellectual beacon are worthy of the humanity which has been given them, only these take their place in the divine plans, and hold a valid claim to the title that belongs to man — the lord of the world.

On the friar, you can listen to our homilies (based on the readings of the day) and reflections. You can also ask us to pray for you or to pray for others. You can subscribe to our website to be informed whenever we publish an update.