“St. Thomas was willing to allow the one truth to be approached by two paths, precisely because he was sure there was only one truth. Because the Faith was the one truth, nothing discovered in nature could ultimately contradict the Faith. Because the Faith was the one truth, nothing really deduced from the Faith could ultimately contradict the facts. It was in truth a curiously daring confidence in the reality of his religion.”
That is G. K. Chesterton, in his book St. Thomas Aquinas. Chesterton is clearly concerned that the world is slipping back into a pre-Aquinas age.
Before Aquinas, Christian theology was heavily influenced by Plato. We can thank Augustine for that fact. As Augustine unfolded the meaning of the gospel of John’s opening line, “In the beginning was the logos,” Christianity ended up looking very Platonic. Plato believed there is an overarching logic and reason of the world, which he called the logos. There are what we now call the Platonic ideals, these perfect forms of things. There is the perfect form of the tree and of love and of friendship. All of these ideals exist up there in some abstract world. We are mucking around on Earth and can see pale reflections of all these things. We see a tree here or there, but they are not the ideal tree. We have friends, but they are not ideal friends. What we are constantly doing is seeing the things on the Earth and thinking about these perfect forms.
Aquinas comes along and says Christians are spending too much time thinking about Plato, about lofty things. Instead, they should be reading Aristotle and thinking about grounded things. The distinction between them is captured really nicely in Raphael’s painting “The School of Athens.” In the center, Plato and Aristotle are talking. Plato is pointing up because that is where the important things are. Aristotle has his hand flat pointing down at the ground, because that is where the important things are.
Aquinas comes along and says that the Church has been thinking way too much about Plato, the lofty stuff, and way too little about Aristotle, the grounded stuff. What we need to start doing is paying attention to the grounded stuff, the things of the world. Chesterton notes:
In a word, St. Thomas was making Christendom more Christian in making it more Aristotelian. This is not a paradox, but a plain truism, which can only be missed by those who may know what is meant by an Aristotelian, but have simply forgotten what is meant by a Christian. As compared with a Jew, a Moslem, a Buddhist, a Deist, or most obvious alternatives, a Christian means a man who believes that deity or sanctity has attached to matter or entered the world of the senses.
That’s what being a Christian means. It means we believe the logos was made flesh.
We can see the tension in churches today. You can walk around churches and say, “Christ is God,” and everybody will say, “Yep, that is right.” Nobody will ever once correct you. But if you walk around churches and say “Christ is man,” everyone will instantly correct you and say, “Oh that’s not all; he is also God.” When we say, “Christ is God,” nobody ever says, “Oh, and he is man too.” But Christ is both fully God and fully Man
That is what Aquinas is driving at. The incarnation means those two statements, “Christ is God” and “Christ is man,” are identically true. They are both imperfect, neither captures the totality of Christ. But one of them is not more true than the other. Christ is fully God. Christ is fully man. Can we learn about God by looking at both the things of heaven and the things of the world? Aquinas is saying we really need to be doing both of those things.
Aquinas says that if you want to learn about God, you can think about the Bible. It’s great to think about the Bible. You learn a lot about God in the Bible. But you can also think about the things of earth. Both are ways to ultimately find out about God, because in the end, there is only one truth. God is discoverable by revelation, but God is also discoverable by reason.
We have to keep this paradox constantly in mind. Christ is both divine and flesh, the logos is both with God and made flesh. Our temptation is to get off this balance beam entirely. We read the Bible to learn about God. We read other things to learn about things other than God. We make sure those things are totally separate in our lives. We can talk about the Bible, but if you’re going to talk about God in the Bible, you certainly don’t want to talk about Plato or Aristotle. Then we can talk about Plato and Aristotle, but don’t ever bring the Bible into those discussions.
Aquinas is arguing that these things are not separate. We learn about God by reading the Bible and through divine revelation. We also learn about God by thinking about all the other things we see. This idea that we learn about God in all these ways is not a shocking statement to Augustine. It is not a shocking statement to Aquinas, It is also not a shocking statement to the Apostle Paul.
In his letter to the Romans, Paul writes, “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (ESV). Paul says everywhere you look, there’s God. We, on the other hand, always want to rip the world in two. We show up on a Sunday morning to think about God. Then we walk out of church and we go through the rest of our life. If we remember to do a Bible study or a daily devotion, then we think about God again. But what about the rest of all the stuff you are learning and doing in your life? Does that have anything to do with God? We’ve completely separated all that stuff out.
The challenge of thinking about the Logos made flesh is to realize whatever you are seeing and doing Tuesday at 3:00 is somehow a reflection of the work of God. Christ really was a man, and what that means is he was a person like us. We think, “Sure, he was human, but he was a perfect human. Not like me.” The classic example is “Away in the manger.” “No crying he makes.” He was a baby who never even cried. But that is wrong. Christ really was a person like you. He went through life like you did. He pounded nails in boards, just like my friend Bob, who is a carpenter, does. Christ stood around and argued with people. That is what I do. Christ slept and ate and walked and laughed just like we all do. He also, not incidentally, created the world.
We need to get rid of this division in our mind that the things of God and the things of the world have no connection. They are very tightly connected. As Aquinas teaches us, that is the point of the Incarnation.
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