Madonna and Child with Augustine and Thomas by Fra Angelico

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Book Length: 624 pages

The Middle Ages have been maligned in many respects, but one of the most egregious calumnies against the Age of Faith was that it was a Dark Age of philosophical inquiry and intellectual development. It was quite the contrary—it was the Golden Age of Christendom, no less in philosophy than in art, architecture, and literature. We must instead recognize that our age is a veritable Dark Age, for it is lacking in creativity and vitality; birth rates in the West have plummeted in the name of social and economic progress, universities have become wheelhouses of usury and sophistry in the name of bringing education to all, and art has become laughingly ugly in the name of individual expression. To add further insult to these intolerable injuries, modern man is repeatedly told that he lives (to apply Leibniz’s famous statement) in the “best of all possible worlds”. Moreover, ours is an age wherein the average person who identifies as Catholic has little to no knowledge (and thus little to no love) of their faith and the heritage of Christendom. From their youth, their minds are assaulted by the viciously subtle aura of secularism and the treachery of the Post-Conciliar Church, whose shepherds feed their sheep with stones instead of bread. Thus when they reach adulthood, their souls are thrown out into the spiritual wasteland of modernity without even the most basic of defenses; is it any wonder why there are so many bad Catholics today? We ought to lament with the prophet Osee: “My people have been silent, because they had no knowledge” (Osee 4:6). In order, therefore, to discover the truth of what has been shamelessly misrepresented to us, we must consult a worthy guide on this journey into these ages long gone yet still with us. One need search no further than the second volume of Fr. Fredrick Copleston’s colossal A History of Philosophy series.

Beginning with the first Apologists and the Early Catholic Fathers, and continuing to the thought of Duns Scotus, the millennia-spanning nature of Christian philosophy covered by Fr. Copleston finds itself replete with great minds and fascinating ideas. Many names appear in this work which will ring familiar to knowledgeable Catholics, such as St. Justin Martyr, St. John Damascene, St. Anselm of Canterbury, and St. Albert the Great. Even the thought of St. Bonaventure, who is known far more for his mystical teachings than his forays into the domain of philosophy, is given ample examination here. In addition to these illustrious names, there are also others worthy of wider recognition that are given their due in these pages, such as Robert Grosseteste and Alexander of Hales. Alongside these Catholic thinkers, the systems of infidel schools are also covered in certain parts of the text, and in a befitting manner. For it is not only instructive to read of the development of the philosophical schools of Christendom, but also to learn of the various outside sources which competed against them, such as the thought of the Gnostics and the Muslim commentators of Aristotle, the two most famous of these being Avicenna and Averroes. Quite understandably, however, the names which will stand out the most to readers in this intellectual expedition are those two titans of Church philosophy, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, both of whom are given a thoroughly excellent treatment.

One of the most fascinating discussions in this book which appears in the chapters about both St. Augustine and St. Thomas is that of the ideas of God. This concept, as is explained within the text, is related to Plato’s teaching of the ideas, concepts which exist in a higher abstract realm as exemplars of the forms of visible things. As Fr. Copleston relates, St. Augustine fully embraced this belief as a means of understanding how God created and how He governs the world:

In the Confessions the Saint exclaims that the eternal ‘reasons’ of created things remain unchangeably in God, and in De Ideis he explains that the divine ideas are ‘certain archetypal forms or stable and unchangeable reasons of things, which were not themselves formed but are contained in the divine mind eternally and are always the same. They neither pass or arise away, but whatever arises and passes away is formed according to them.’ The corollary of this is that creatures have ontological truth in so far as they embody or exemplify the model in the divine mind, that God Himself is the standard of truth. This exemplarist doctrine, was, of course, influenced by neo-Platonic theory, according to which the Platonic exemplary ideas were contained in Nous, though for Augustine the ideas are contained in the Word, who is not a subordinate hypostasis, like the neo-Platonic Nous, but the second Person of the Trinity, consubstantial with the Father.

(73)

Such a marvelous statement, which explains much of our own experience! For, does it not stand to the twin tests of faith and reason that the forms of love we easily comprehend—from family, from friends, etc.—are but imperfect reflections of that love which flows from God, who is Love itself? Our quest for love is a quest for God, even if carried out unsuitably. This, of course, does not vindicate wanderings from the path of salvation, but rather proves how empty it is to search for a kind of love which is against the laws of God. Since this desire for absolute and undying love is implanted within our nature by Him who is eternal, and who is love itself, therefore to depart from the ultimate fulfillment of our desire by seeking refuge in lesser things is foolishness. Indeed, even the bliss offered by the best of company cannot be enough to fill that hole in our heart which is shaped in the Cross of Christ. As the author notes, this beautiful doctrine of the divine ideas was accepted and clarified by the Angelic Doctor as:

…he was careful to state it in a way as not to imply that there are ontologically separate ideas in God, a doctrine which would impair divine simplicity, for in God there is no real distinction save that between the three divine Persons.

(Ibid)

To understand how the acceptance of the divine ideas is so crucial to the thought of St. Thomas, one needs to look further into the text. In the chapter which treats of his moral theory, for instance, one finds the following excerpt concerning the subject of the natural law:

As God is eternal and His idea of man eternal, the promulgation of the law is ex parte Dei, though it is not eternal ex parte creaturae. This eternal law, existing in God, is the origin and font of the natural law, which is a participation of the eternal law. The natural law is expressed passively in man’s natural inclinations, while it is promulgated by the light of reason reflecting on those inclinations, so that inasmuch as every man naturally possesses the inclinations to the end of man and possesses the light of reason, the eternal law is sufficiently promulgated for every man.

(409)

Following from this point, Fr. Copleston adds that:

…God is Himself the supreme value and the source of all Value and the source and measure of all value: values depend on Him, but in the sense that they are participations or finite reflections of God, not in the sense that God arbitrarily confers on them their character as values.

(410)

In contemplating these passages, there is much room for wonder. Wonder—for the powerful concept of the divine ideas helps us to better understand the majesty and glory of God. In fact, it does well to help us comprehend that we can never know enough about Him! For He is the source and we, being part of His Creation, flow from that source. Or as Our Lord said in the Gospel: “I am the vine: you the branches” (John 15:5). Once the divine ideas are grasped, it is easily seen that such words apply to the spiritual life as well as our physical existence. The sublime truth of the dependence we have upon God should, therefore, inspire us with a deep humility and a profound sense of gratitude. Moreover, embracing the divine ideas defends us against the false belief that God is a legislator who arbitrarily commands what is good and what is evil.

But if there is much room for wonder, there is also ample room for lamentation. For how many who spout out the term “natural law” in political circles truly have an idea of what they speak? The natural law is not the result of man’s “evolved consciousness”—if it were, it would be changeable, for if one accepts the Darwinist belief, then the natural law came about through his evolution, his change, from something that was not man to the first man. Such a natural law, furthermore, would not be objective precisely because it would be mutable; it would be the result of man’s perception of the world, not a true law which exists inside and outside of himself. But the Catholic belief would have us realize that there was no change at all; the idea of the natural law eternally exists in the mind of God, and was received by the first man, Adam, and is passed down to us. Thus if one wants to maintain the idea of the natural law as an unchanging source of morality, it must be done on the grounds of the divine ideas.

Another thought-provoking subject in this work is that of the famed Problem of Universals. It was not an entirely new debate in the history of philosophy, for one finds an analogous struggle in the time of Ancient Greece with the issue of the One and the Many. However, the revival of this fundamental question of the relationship between the individual and the whole found new life in a Europe which had been awakened by the valor of Charlemagne and the vigor of the new civilization of Christendom. Though it may seem overly semantic, the chapter on this is well worth reading through. It will probably not be the most exciting part of the text for the reader; the real fruit of it, however, comes in pondering the significance of that debate, not only in regards to what it meant for the Age of Faith, but also what it entails for our time as well. For on one end there was Exaggerated Realism, which as Fr. Copleston states held “…a naive and exact correspondence between thought and things” (140), and on the other end there came Nominalism, which outright denied the existence of universal concepts.

Following from the second extreme, which was developed further in the Late Middle Ages by William of Ockham, one can see the roots of many modern and postmodern philosophical errors. One of these is the astoundingly stupid idea that language cannot communicate objective meaning, which was proposed by the Jewish founding father of deconstructionism, Jacques Derrida. According to him and his followers, language then has no relation to the things or concepts it attempts to describe—thus a denial of the universal of language is involved, and following this, a denial of the universal essences expressed by it. One can see similar connections in other false philosophies, such as Gender Theory, which denies the universals of manhood and womanhood, and Critical Race Theory, which denies the universal of Whiteness. They assign truth-value only to the names which have been given to these things—but seeing in them only ploys of artifice, not as means of recognizing essential natures.

In this debate, the wisdom of St. Thomas shone through like a guiding light. For in recognizing the divine ideas but in a means which avoided the doctrinal and logical problems involved of ascribing distinctions to God beyond that of the Holy Trinity, the Angelic Doctor paved the way for moderate realism, which proved itself the best resolution to this question. Suffice to say it is a great injustice to the thought of St. Thomas to reduce his position to that of a “Christian Aristotelian”; he was not, for he received the Augustinian tradition and its neo-Platonic elements favorably. If he was a true Aristotelian, he would have rejected the divine ideas, which he did not do. Considering the fact that Thomism is undergoing something of a revival at present, it is especially important for those enamored with this eminent school of thought to not fall victim to crude representations of this philosophy and instead to seek out the best interpreters possible.

We therefore have much to learn and reclaim in the intellectual and social struggle in which we are engaged. In this, the thought of the Medievals is crucial; and in this volume, Fr. Copleston’s masterful assessments of these thinkers shows us the path to truly understanding this tradition and finding our place as inheritors of it. Along these lines, it must be stated that before delving into this work, it would help the reader immensely if they have some familiarity with the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, given the influences they had on our philosophical tradition. The author does not shy away from his beliefs, and this is one of the greatest strengths of the text. How many books on philosophy, let alone histories of philosophy, are written from the vantage point of those who have the light of the Faith? Very few, while we are bombarded by the murmuring of secular academics who know not of what spirit they are. Thus the presence of this volume is quite relieving. Keep in mind, dear reader, that Fr. Copleston’s style is very academic, so this text is not for the intellectually faint of heart—after all, he was writing for seminarians. It is a magisterial resource for students of philosophy, expounding these thought-systems with graceful clarity and soundness, alongside numerous citations and references for further elucidation and inquiry. May Catholic students of philosophy read this work, and be inspired by it to become true philosophers—lovers of wisdom.