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Aquinas's Fourth Way, Beauty, and Virtues
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
Many questions have been raised concerning the logical validity of Aquinas's Fourth Way. Some commentators judge the Fourth Way to be problematic while others find it delightful. In this paper, the Fourth Way is understood as a reflection on what it is to attribute to things around us scalar predicates. Does the Fourth Way not resemble what Wittgenstein observes when speaking about ‘the standard meter’? If so, is the Fourth Way significantly different from what might be called a ‘mystical’ line of thinking? If not, it would be this mystical meaning that is used in the Way with respect to ‘God exists’. How should we understand this mystical meaning? By noting that beauty appears as a response-dependent property and by stressing that in order to attribute it to something we must possess certain virtues. Beauty would then be relative to virtues which are linked to the mystical meaning of ‘God’. Why could such a use, concerning the predicate ‘beautiful’ (even if that is not mentioned in the Fourth Way) not constitute an explanation of ‘what we call God’? This is a question to which the reading of the Fourth Way might lead.
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1 This text still features in many commentaries on Aquinas's thought since the end of the Nineteenth Century. It was linked to the Anti-modernist polemic and to a certain interpretation of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith of Vatican I (1870). Even if the text's claim was, rather, that knowledge of God's existence is possible in the natural light of human reason, it ‘is significantly different from the suggestion that faith in God is founded on or somehow procured by reason’, as Kerr, Fergus says (‘Knowing by reason alone: What Vatican I has never said’, New Blackfriars, Vol. 91, No. 1033 [2010], p. 215-228) p. 216CrossRefGoogle Scholar in Kerr's paper.
2 I have translated the passages quoted from the Summa Theologiae in this article with the help of the Latin/English edition of the Summa Theologiae by the Dominicans of the English Province, published by Cambridge University Press.
3 Martin, Christopher F.J., Thomas Aquinas: God and Explanations (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p. 171.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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8 Ibid.
9 McCabe also says: ‘We come across God, so to speak, or rather we search and do not come across him, when the universe raises for us a radical question concerning its existence at all. And creation is the name we give to God's answering this question’ (God Matters, p. 413). It seems to me that this approach to God is exactly what we find in the Five Ways.
10 For a contrary opinion: Kerr, Gaven, ‘A Reconsideration of Aquinas's Fourth Way’, American Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 95, Issue 4, Fall 2021Google Scholar.
11 Anscombe and Geach, Three philosophers, op. cit., p. 116 for the last three quotations.
12 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, tr. by Anscombe, G.E.M. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953)Google Scholar, I, 50, p. 25e, for the last two quotations. (My italics on the quotation.)
13 A long time ago, I went with the pupils of my school to Sèvres to see the standard meter — and it was like approaching the Holy Grail. But the pupils were very disappointed to have traveled five hundred kilometers by bus just to see a meter bar (even if it was, we were told, in platinum-iridium)!
14 A note for historians of science and other serious people: I have been told that today the standard meter of the Pavillon de Breteuil is no longer in use. The meter is a light meter: the 299,792,458th part (roughly, I guess) of the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in one second. But I do not see that this changes anything at all to what I have just said, even if it is no longer possible to show The Meter to school children.
15 See Peter Geach, , ‘Good and Evil’, Analysis, Vol. 17, No. 2 (1956), pp. 33-42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I take up Geach's distinction in my own way which I do not claim to be his (and I am even sure it is not his own). Many very good things about the distinction between attributive and predicative have been said by Sibley, Frank, ‘Adjectives, Predicative and Attributive’, Approach to Aesthetics, Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics (ed. by Benson, J., Redfern, B. & Cox, J. Roxbee, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I agree with David S. Oderberg that the distinction between attributive and predicative is best understood in relation to the notion of analogy (The Metaphysics of Good and Evil (Routledge: 2020, p. 41)Google Scholar.
16 See White, Thomas J., ‘Beauty, Transcendence, and the Inclusive Hierarchy of Creation’, Nova et Vetera, Vol. 16, No. 4 (2018), p. 1215-1226CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Thomas Aquinas, In Librum Dionysii De Divinis Nominibus Expositio, IV, lectio 5, § 343 (my translation). See also Ramos, Alice M., Dynamic Transcendantals, Truth, Goodness, & Beauty from a Thomistic Perspective (Washington, D.C: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 X supervenes on Y, if Y depends on and covaries with X, but is not ontologically reducible to X.
19 See Summa Theologiae, I.9.8.
20 Psalms, 27: 4. (Translation of the United States Conference of the Catholic Bishops).
21 This is certainly a trivial remark, but made once again by Levinson, Jerrold, ‘Beauty is not One. The Irreducible Variety of Visual Beauty’, Aesthetic Pursuits, Essays in Philosophy of Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, p. 98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I.13.7. See Davies, Brian, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992Google Scholar, chap. 4.
23 Geach, Peter, Providence and Evil, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, p. 79.Google Scholar
24 This is the formula used by Adams, Robert M., A Theory of Virtue, Excellence in being for the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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26 McCabe, Herbert, ‘The Logic of Mysticism’, The McCabe Reader (ed. by Davies, B. & Kucharski, P., London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), p. 47.Google Scholar
27 See the series of books by von Balthazar, Hans Urs, called The Glory of God: A Theological Aesthetics, T & T Clark, Edinburgh, 1991Google Scholar. A very influential voice indeed in contemporary theology.
28 Gertrude E.M. Anscombe, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, op. cit., p. 6.
29 See Pouivet, Roger, L'Art et le désir de Dieu (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also, ‘Art and the Desire for God : A Thomistic Perspective in Aesthetics’, New Blackfriars, vol. 100, No.1088 (2019), p. 398-409CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 I warmly thank Brian Davies for the care taken to the revision of the English language in this article, remaining solely responsible for its philosophical content.