A relic-related puzzle

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will probably have seen already, but there was a nice interview in Wednesday's Guardian with Zygmunt Bauman, who I blogged about last week. He's still alive, kicking, and apparently being very influential on Ed Miliband.

But on to more important things. I've been reading a lot of Aquinas recently, and remembering why I love him so much. A case in point is a question in part three of the Summa Theologica, where he discusses the nature of Christ's post-resurrection body and his ascension to heaven. He raises a perplexing issue: if Christ's whole body ascended into heaven, what about all the bits of his blood kept as relics by churches? Does that mean the body of Christ which ascended was incomplete, and that he left little bits of himself scattered all over Christendom? No no, says Aquinas, that won't do: Christ took his whole body with him into heaven, and all the blood that had spilled out of him while he was on the cross went with him. The relics are really Christ's blood, though, only their bits of blood didn't flow from his side while he was on the cross but came flowing out of images of Christ when people hit them. So that's alright, then.

Photo credit: Thomas Hawk

Active vs contemplative: Round 2

Hopefully you've got a rough idea now of the distinction between the active and contemplative lives. We've already noted that Thomas thinks that different people are more naturally attracted to one or the other, but is one of them better than the other? According to Thomas, yes: the contemplative life basically kicks the ass of the active life (or it would if that weren't such an outwardly directed action). He uses the example of Mary and Martha: while Martha ran around in the kitchen making dinner, Mary sat at Jesus' feet, listening to him, and Jesus said it was Mary who had chosen the better part. Thomas gives nine reasons why the contemplative life is better. The first eight he nicks from Aristotle (who was talking about the contemplation of the Good and the Beautiful rather than of the Christian God specifically), and one he gets from Jesus:

i) For Thomas, the mind is the best part of human nature, and contemplation is all about the things of the mind, ideas, whereas the active life is all about external, physical things.
ii) The contemplative life is, apparently, more continuous, although I'm not sure why this would make it better.
iii) The contemplative life is more delightful than the active life.
iv) In the contemplative life, all you really need is yourself and God, whereas the active life involves you in the complicated worries of the world. The contemplative life is more self-sufficient, and therefore better.
v) The contemplative life is an end in itself: contemplation of God is the best thing we can do, whereas the active life is much more indirect - we do X so we can achieve Y, so that we can become more Z, and eventually so that we can flourish i.e. get to be with God and contemplate him. The contemplative life is a more direct root to what's good for us.
vi) The contemplative life is about rest in God, unlike the active life, where you're always running around and stressing.
vii) The contemplative life is about divine things, whereas the active life is about human things.
viii) The mind is what makes humans special and distinguishes us from the animals. A lot of the active life is just doing the same things the animals do, so is less uniquely human and therefore less good.
ix) The contemplative life is eternal: contemplating God is what we'll do forever, even after we die. The active life will come to an end with this life, so is more temporary, more fleeting, and therefore less valuable.

Thomas also briefly discusses the fact that sometimes mature Christians are called away from their contemplative lives to serve the Church (Church history abounds with reluctant bishops and churchmen, who are dragged out of their quiet contemplation to do church-y things). Sometimes love demands of us that we sacrifice our prayer-time for people-time. This bothers me: I can't help feeling that when spending time with people becomes an unwelcome distraction from the real business of doing prayer, something's a bit out of joint.

I think the problem here is Thomas' idea of what it means to be human. He lives in a world which arranged in a hierarchy consisting of four groups: physical things like stones at the bottom, which just exist; plants, which both exist and live; animals, which exist, live, and are conscious; and human beings, the climax of creation: we exist, live, and are conscious, but we also have reason and intellect. For humans to be at their most human, to be who God created them to be, they should do the things that only humans can do: reason, think, love. Doing the things we share with animals, or doing things which don't involve reasoning, thinking or loving, is a step down from what's best for us, a falling short.

My problem is this: Thomas ends up suggesting that what we really want to do is leave our bodies behind. In an ideal world (and in the world to come), we wouldn't need to eat, drink, sleep etc., we'd just contemplate God, intellectually. All the time. Thomas would probably be a bit offended if you suggested to him that he didn't think that our bodies were good: they are, God made them, and they point us to God. But they end up a bit like signs along a road: you reach a sign, it points you where you want it to go, and then you leave it behind, because the ultimate good doesn't have space for trees and mountains and babies and food: there's only really space for you and God.

All this ends up undermining rather badly Thomas' earlier attempts to suggest that the active and contemplative life are equally valid options, and people just happen to be more disposed to one or the other. What that ends up meaning is that some people are more disposed to God than others. Thomas wants to affirm the goodness of the world whilst also saying that God is good-er than any of the things in the world, and I don't find his attempts to do so very satisfying. I think he ends up saying that everyone who really loves God will express that by wanting the contemplative life more than anything, and I think that rather devalues, y'know, most of human life. What do you think?

Next time: some more positive thoughts about the contemplative life.

Active vs contemplative: Round 1

Christian monasticism started with the Desert Fathers who, in about the third century, started retreating into the desert to live alone and think about God. A lot. As monasticism grew and expanded, the monastic life, particularly the contemplative monastic life, came to be seen as the height of Christian discipleship: if you really love God, the thinking went, what you'll most want is to spend all your time in prayer and contemplation, ideally with only minimal contact with other people. None of your Sister Act getting-out-into-the-community-and-painting-murals, just you and God, and an awful lot of praying. You notice this model in, for example, Thomas a Kempis' The Imitation of Christ, which talks a lot about how annoying it is to spend time with people, who only distract you from praying and lead you into sin. Bastards.

Another Thomas who talks about the contemplative life is our old friend Thomas Aquinas. He distinguishes between the active and the contemplative forms of life: the active life is focused on external activities, whereas the contemplative life is about the internal contemplation of truth. Some people are naturally more disposed to the active life (most people, presumably); others (some monks) to the contemplative life. We all start off at the active life, though, and to get to the contemplative life you have to first work hard at being moral in your external activities, or your sinfulness and bad habits will stop you from being able to catch sight of God in contemplation. Contemplation is more enjoyable than anything else people do: how could it not be, when it's God we're contemplating? Whatever we do in this life, we're all destined for eternal contemplation of God: that's the 'beatific vision' (happy vision), the face-to-face encounter with God for which we're all made. We get glimpses of the beatific vision every now and then in this life, if we work really hard for it, but we're all too often distracted by bodily concerns. This is the goal, though: eternal contemplation of God; and to really love God is to want that more than anything.

This model was pretty common in Thomas' time, but it's pretty rare these days (leastways, I'd never heard of it till I started studying patristics). The good thing about it is that, when this model was generally accepted, theology wasn't seen as an abstract intellectual inquiry with no real relation to faith, as is often the case these days: to do theology was to practice contemplation and prayer, and the idea that you could do theology without it being an expression of your love for God would have been totally bizarre to Thomas and his contemporaries. There are less good things, too, but I'll talk more about that later this week. Till then, contemplate this.

Photo credit: Lawrence OP on Flickr

Aquinas on the Four Senses of Scripture

Traditionally, the Church has identified four levels of meaning or 'senses' of Scripture: the literal sense and three spiritual senses - the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical senses. Aquinas explains these in his Summa Theologiae, in Article 10 of Question 1 in the Prima Pars:

Whether in Holy Scripture a word may have several senses?

Point: How confusing would that be? We'd all get confused and believe untrue things about God, and surely the Bible can't lead us into untruth, right?

On the other hand: Gregory the Great says that "Holy Writ, by the manner of its speech transcends every science, because in one and the same sentence, while it describes a fact, it reveals a mystery."

Reply: The author of Scripture is God, who is able to signify meaning with things as well as words, so some of the things described by the words of the Bible themselves point to other meanings. The historical or literal sense of Scripture is the obvious meaning, the things that the words directly point to, so when the Bible talks about rocks, the literal sense of its words are rocks: you know, those hard, stony things. But then there's also a threefold spiritual sense. When things in the Old Law signify things in the New Law, that's the allegorical sense: so when the Old Testament describes Moses hitting the rock and water flowing from it, that text refers literally to an actual rock, and allegorically to Jesus, from whom living water flows. Then when things symbolise what we ought to do, they are to be read in the moral sense: so when Jesus challenges anyone without sin to throw rocks at the woman caught in adultery, the moral or tropological sense is that we ought not to judge because we are sinful too. Finally, the anagogical sense is when the words of the Bible refer to our eternal glory, so when the Israelite prophets refer to the restoration of Jerusalem, the literal meaning is the actual city of Jerusalem, but the anagogical sense is the Kingdom of God.

Aquinas says that these four senses don't need to confuse us, because they're all based on the literal sense, and there isn't anything in the Bible which is there in the spiritual sense but not in the literal sense.

This division of the meaning of Scripture into several senses is pretty common from very early in the Church right up to the Reformation, after which it fell a bit out of favour, and everyone got very excited about reading the Bible literally or pulling it apart with 'scientific' historical criticism. It's been becoming more popular again recently, though, and however much people might talk about sticking to the literal sense of Scripture, it's rare to find anyone who completely avoids the other senses. I think we do several of these senses a lot in the charismatic church, particularly when reading the Old Testament or prophesying, but often people aren't that aware of what they're doing when they give, say, an allegorical reading of Scripture. I think it's worth being aware of because how we read the Bible matters, and how we understand what we're doing when we read the Bible affects both how we read it and how we assess other peoples' readings of it.

Photo credit: GeoWombats on Flickr

Thomas Aquinas: not a feminist

Question: should woman have been made as part of the original creation?

Point: 1. It would seem not. Aristotle says that woman is a less good version of a man, and the original creation can't have included anything defective, right? (Thanks, Aristotle). 2. Subjection and inferiority are a result of sin, and without sin, we'd all be equal. But women are clearly crappier than men because the 'active' is always superior to the 'passive.' 3. We should get rid of things that tempt us to sin, and women tempt men to sin.

On the other hand: The Bible tells us that God said 'it is not good for man to be alone.'

Reply: Man needed someone to help him (not as a friend, or a co-worker ha! Obviously if it was about having a friend or someone to help with practical stuff, God would have just made another man. Women? Friends? Partners? Don't make me laugh) with the work of procreation. 1. Women are defective as individuals, but that doesn't mean the whole species of humanity is defective. A healthy male seed will grow into a healthy male baby, and women are only born when the seed's not quite right, or when there's a damp south wind, or something like that (thanks, ancient biologists!). 2. There are two different sorts of subjection: the bad sort, where the ruler manages his subject selfishly - this is a result of sin - and the good sort, where the ruler manages his subject for their own good, and this would have existed even without sin because men are more rational than women, who need ruling over for their own good. 3. God couldn't just take away everything from creation that might lead him into sin, and women add value to creation as well as temptation.

It's tempting to make allowances for Thomas, because I really do love him, but having seen 2. deployed as an argument for why women shouldn't be allowed to be leaders, in a book by the wife of a prominent Christian leader (though mightn't her emotions be clouding her judgment? Let's hope a man checked it first...), and having just read an excellent book by Grace Jantzen about the way that our ideas about gender and power are at work in all sorts of surprising areas of Christian theology, I think this matters, quite a lot. I think it should change how we read Thomas as a whole, knowing that this is there underneath it, and I think that seeing how much his weird ideas about men and women are bound up with weird ideas about biology, and yet are still pretty close to some of the ways people talk about men and women now should make us think a bit more carefully about what it is we really mean when we talk about the difference between men and women.

Photo credit: 'Lawrence OP' on Flickr

Aquinas: Where is the garden of Eden?

There are two motivations for writing this post: firstly, I thought it might be nice to talk about how Aquinas writes - partly in case you ever feel like reading some yourself (the whole thing is available here), but mostly because I want you to get a feel for how he works. Secondly, because I think this particular question is especially charming, and demonstrates quite nicely that, however rational you might think you're being, you can still come up with some darn' stoopid answers to vexing theological questions, Doctor of the Church though you may be.

Some context first, then. The Summa Theologia is in three parts. The Prima Pars ('First Part' for you non-Latin speakers) deals with God and his work in creation. The Prima Secundae and Secunda Secundae (Parts 2a and 2b) deal with humankind and their work in ethics and in attaining the final human end in God. The Tertia Pars (Third Part) deals with Christ and his work, including a discussion of the sacraments.

The whole of the Summa is based around questions. Aquinas starts with a question, breaks it down into sub-questions or 'articles', and then addresses each in turn. He does this in a style that was popular in universities of the time: someone proposes an answer to the question which runs contrary to the 'right' answer, giving reasons for it; someone quotes an important authority disagreeing; then someone explains why the authority was right and the first argument was wrong. Normally this would be done in a debating context, but in the Summa it's really just Thomas arguing with himself. So each question goes like this:

Question: is theological position X the case?

Point: Yes it is, for these reasons: 1) A, 2) B, 3) C

On the other hand: Authoritative person Y says Z, which contradicts the above points.

Reply: This is why points A, B, and C were wrong and authoritative person Y was right.

Let's look at an example from the Prima Pars which, in discussing creation, gets into some questions about what human life was like in Eden before the Fall. Question 102 addresses 'The Garden of Eden, the scene of innocence' and breaks this question down into four component parts:

1. Whether Paradise is a physical place
2. Whether it is a suitable place for human occupation
3. What man was put in Paradise for
4. Whether he should have been made in Paradise
   

We'll look at the first point of inquiry (that's 1a.102, article 1):

Article 1: Is Paradise a physical place?

Point: It would seem not. 1. Bede says that it reaches 'as far as the lunar sphere', which can't be true of any earthly place - not only does the earth not go up that high, but there's a region of fire below the moon that would burn it. 2. Genesis says that it's the source of four rivers, but we know that those four rivers have their sources all over the place. 3. No one has found it yet. 4. The tree of life was there, but that's something spiritual, so Paradise must be a spiritual rather than a physical place. 5. If Paradise was physical, so must its trees have been, but God creates trees on the third day but only plants the garden of Eden after the six days are finished.

On the other hand: Augustine says, there are three general opinions about Paradise; one would have Paradise understood only in a physical sense, another only in a spiritual sense; the third takes Paradise in both ways, and I confess this is the opinion I favour.

Reply: Scripture describes Paradise in the form of a historical narrative, so we must read it as history and believe in Paradise as a physical place. It must have been in the East, because it would have been in the noblest spot in the earth, and the East is on the right side of the heavens as Aristotle tells us, and the right side is noble than the left. 1. Bede didn't mean that Paradise literally reached the lunar sphere, but that it had a really temperate climate, like the heavenly bodies. Duh. 2. We know that some rivers go underground and then reappear elsewhere - the rivers really do have their source in Paradise, and the places we consider to be their sources are actually where they reemerge after going underground. 3. We haven't found Paradise yet because it's either behind some big mountains or in the middle of the sea somewhere. 4. The tree of life both material and spiritual, like the rock in the desert that signified Christ. 5. Either we could go with Augustine, who said that only the 'seminal virtues' of the plants were created on the third day and they didn't start growing till afterwards, or we could go with other people who say that when Genesis says God planted the garden of Eden, it was just pointing out that this had happened at the same time as all the other plants were created.

Thomas Aquinas and the end of humankind

This isn't about hell or the End Times. Chill out. For Aquinas, it's really important that everything has its own particular end, by which he means a goal or a purpose. The end of physical but non-living things is to resemble God insofar as they participate in his properties, mostly just by existing. The end of a plant is to resemble God, particularly by existing and being alive. The end of animals is to resemble God by existing, being alive, and having some sort of consciousness. Everything exists to be caught up into God in accordance with its own particular thingness. A rock exists to be the rockiest rock it can be; a poodle to be maximally poodle-y, and your momma to be so fat that when she steps on the scales they say “to be continued...” Everything came from God, and everything has its end in God.

So, what is the distinctively human end?
This is complicated because human nature is complicated. On the one hand, humans are animals, and like animals we participate in God in existing, in being alive, and in having consciousness (One of my lecturers once got involved in an icebreaker game in which everyone had to answer the question, ‘What is your favourite animal?’ Being an Aquinas scholar, she was used to thinking of people as animals and so she replied, ‘My husband.’ Only later did it occur to her that the funny looks she got might be the consequence of implying that ‘My husband is an animal’ which means something rather different now than it would have for Aquinas). Humans are distinguished from the rest of the animals by the fact that they have reason and intellect, and are also distinguished by the fact that, where the end of the animals is in fulfilling their nature, the final end of human nature surpasses the intrinsic capabilities of human nature. Our end is in God, not just in participating in his qualities, but in contemplating his essence, in knowing and loving him, which is made possible by our reason but also by additional grace that takes us beyond what we’re naturally capable of. Our end is ‘the beatific vision’ which basically means ‘the happy vision.’

A note on reason
When we think about reason, we think about it in a post-Enlightenment world in which it often feels a bit like the sort of calculation a computer or a machine does, and see it as being fundamentally opposed to other things that make us human, like emotion. This isn’t quite the case for Aquinas, firstly because he doesn’t chop human nature up quite so completely, but also because for him, our emotions and gut instincts and all the things that make mathematicians feel a bit queasy are parts of us which can get caught up into reason and make it richer. The reason that reason gets us to God is because it starts us thinking about the world. We see all the stuff going on, and we start asking why and how and who and when, and eventually we want to know how it all started in the first place, and what we’re doing here, and how we should live, and whether it’s even worth it, and much as in Plato’s Symposium, the beauty of the world leads us in the end to Beauty itself, to God.

Meet Thomas Aquinas

I thought that Thomas Aquinas deserved a whole post about him and his life - I suspect I'll come back to him more than once in the future, so you ought at least to be introduced. Aquinas is one of the great theologians, like, ever. He wrote about pretty much everything theological topic you can imagine, and was influential enough to be one of the few theologians still studied outside of the world of theology by people writing about ethics, law, politics and philosophy. He's one of only 33 people the Catholic Church have designated a Doctor of the Church (33 might sound like a lot, but bear in mind that's 33 people over 2,000 odd years), and some would argue that he's the Catholic theologian. He's famous for being one of the main people to rediscover Aristotle in the West, for basically inventing the doctrine of transubstantiation, for writing about natural law, and for lots of other things. His most famous work is the Summa Theologiae, possibly the longest theological work ever (if you can fit it on one shelf you're doing well). I reckon a good few days of my life so far have been spent reading Aquinas, and I've read maybe 1% of it.

Thomas was born in 1225 or 1227. His family wanted him to be a Benedictine abbot, which was a very respectable career for a younger son of a noble family in those days. But he decided he wanted to join the Dominican order, much less reputable – where the Benedictines were wealthy landowners, the Dominicans earned their keep largely through begging. His family were unhappy about that, so did what any loving relatives would do – kidnapped him and locked him in their castle for two years. At one point, his brothers tried to break his will by hiring a prostitute to seduce him, but he fought her off with a burning stick. Later on, he told a friend that he'd prayed for God's help in resisting the temptation and had a vision of two angels who gave him a white girdle and told him that it was the girdle of perpetual virginity. In the end, his family let him escape, and off he went. He went to the university in Paris, and began a life of studying and teaching, which continued until his death. He got involved with all sorts of theological controversies, but none of them were that funny, so I won't go into details.

The later years of his life were spent writing his massive Summa Theologiae – basically a comprehensive work about the whole of Christian theology, broken into three parts: the first about God and his creation; the second about humanity and ethics; and the third about Christ and his saving work. Part way through part 3, Aquinas stopped writing, and told his scribe that he couldn't write any more because “it all seems like straw.” Shortly afterwards he became ill, and died on 7 March 1274.