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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2024
St. Thomas’s originality lies in the fact that he made his philosophy a welded, organic whole including and co-ordinating in the sweep of its horizon the entire panorama of being. To understand the humanism which is one facet of his philosophy. We must understand his W eltanschauung : his vision of the world, of reality, as a whole. It is the aim of this essay simply to set forth St. Thomas’s teaching, hoping thereby to shew that his philosophy is humanist in what has been submitted in the preceding pages to be the true meaning of humanism.
Man is not to be studied as an isolated phenomenon : he is part of a design infinitely vaster than himself. It is of importance to realise that St. Thomas’s metaphysic, like Aristotle’s, is teleological. In exitu creaturarum a primo principio, he says in the Sentences, attenditur quaedam circulatio vel regiratio, eo quod omnia, revertuntur sicut in finem in id a quo sicut a principio prodierunt. He sees the birth of worlds, the march of centuries, as an emanation from the infinite, which in a vast sweep runs its course back to the abyss of energy from which it sprang. The Aristotelean idea of potentiality applies to the universe as a whole : each entity aspiring towards its proper actualization, the cosmos itself is viewed as ‘yearning,’ in the Aristotelean phrase, for its fulfilment. The desire of the soul for assimilation with the godhead is the supreme human example of this general trend.
1 Commentary on I Sentences, Dist. xiv. Qu. 2. art 2.
2 II Contra Gentiles 2.
3 Quaest. Disp. De Veritate, Qu. xxi, art. 4.
4 Commentary on Epistle to Ephesians i, 23.
5 Summa Theologica, Ia.—IIae., Qu. iv, art. 5, ad. 5.
6 We must note how for St. Thomas all the moral life, the virtues, mortification, asceticism, are part of the general scheme of completion. The virtues tend to make man habitually what is potentially best in him; mortification precisely to bring out what is best and, above all, to avoid the over-development of a part at the expense of the whole. The Thomist view of chastity, for example, is significant: the virtue which tends to the perfecting of the mind, for the mind is dulled, becomes obfuscated, by excess of sensual indulgence. And it must be emphasized too that the negative character of asceticism is fully recognized. Mortification, precisely because it is negative, is a means merely and not an end: it must never be sought for its own sake but only as an instrument.
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