[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

evidence of his senses, that was strong enough to bear the weight of a definite deduction.
http://www.dur.ac.uk/martin.ward/gkc/books/aquinas.html (72 of 77)17/07/2005 15:10:01
St. Thomas Aquinas
From all this we may easily infer that this philosopher does not merely touch on social things, or even
take them in his stride to spiritual things; though that is always his direction. He takes hold of them, he
has not only a grasp of them, but a grip. As all his controversies prove, he was perhaps a perfect example
of the iron hand in the velvet glove. He was a man who always turned his full attention to anything; and
he seems to fix even passing things as they pass. To him even what was momentary was momentous.
The reader feels that any small point of economic habit or human accident is for the moment almost
scorched under the converging rays of a magnifying lens. It is impossible to put in these pages a
thousandth part of the decisions on details of life that may be found in his work; it would be like
reprinting the law-reports of an incredible century of just judges and sensible magistrates. We can only
touch on one or two obvious topics of this kind.
I have noted the need to use modern atmospheric words for certain ancient atmospheric things; as in
saying that St. Thomas was what most modern men vaguely mean by an Optimist. In the same way, he
was very much what they vaguely mean by a Liberal. I do not mean that any of his thousand political
suggestions would suit any such definite political creed; if there are nowadays any definite political
creeds. I mean, in the same sense, that he has a sort of atmosphere of believing in breadth and balance
and debate. He may not be a Liberal by the extreme demands of the moderns for we seem always to
mean by the moderns the men of the last century, rather than this. He was very much of a Liberal
compared with the most modern of all moderns for they are nearly all of them turning into Fascists and
Hitlerites. But the point is that he obviously preferred the sort of decisions that are reached by
deliberation rather than despotic action; and while, like all his contemporaries and coreligionists, he has
no doubt that true authority may be authoritative, he is rather averse to the whole savour of its being
arbitrary. He is much less of an Imperialist than Dante, and even his Papalism is not very Imperial. He is
very fond of phrases like "a mob of free men" as the essential material of a city; and he is emphatic upon
the fact that law, when it ceases to be justice, ceases even to be law.
If this work were controversial, whole chapters could be given to the economics as well as the ethics of
the Thomist system. It would be easy to show that, in this matter, he was a prophet as well as a
philosopher. He foresaw from the first the peril of that mere reliance on trade and exchange, which was
beginning about his time; and which has culminated in a universal commercial collapse in our time. He
did not merely assert that Usury is unnatural, though in saying that he only followed Aristotle and
obvious common sense, which was never contradicted by anybody until the time of the commercialists,
who have involved us in the collapse. The modern world began by Bentham writing the Defence of
Usury, and it has ended after a hundred years in even the vulgar newspaper opinion finding Finance
indefensible. But St. Thomas struck much deeper than that. He even mentioned the truth, ignored during
the long idolatry of trade, that things which men produce only to sell are likely to be worse in quality
than the things they produce in order to consume. Something of our difficulty about the fine shades of
Latin will be felt when we come to his statement that there is always a certain inhonestas about trade.
For inhonestas does not exactly mean dishonesty. It means approximately "something unworthy," or,
more nearly perhaps, "something not quite handsome." And he was right; for trade, in the modern sense,
does mean selling something for a little more than it is worth, nor would the nineteenth century
economists have denied it. They would only have said that he was not practical; and this seemed sound
while their view led to practical prosperity. Things are a little different now that it has led to universal
http://www.dur.ac.uk/martin.ward/gkc/books/aquinas.html (73 of 77)17/07/2005 15:10:01
St. Thomas Aquinas
bankruptcy.
Here, however, we collide with a colossal paradox of history. The Thomist philosophy and theology,
quite fairly compared with other philosophies like the Buddhist or the Monist, with other theologies like
the Calvinist or the Christian Scientist, is quite obviously a working and even a fighting system; full of
common sense and constructive confidence; and therefore normally full of hope and promise. Nor is this
hope vain or this promise unfulfilled. In this not very hopeful modern moment, there are no men so
hopeful as those who are today looking to St. Thomas as a leader in a hundred crying questions of
craftsmanship and ownership and economic ethics. There is undoubtedly a hopeful and creative
Thomism in our time. But we are none the less puzzled by the fact that this did not immediately follow
on St. Thomas's time. It is true that there was a great march of progress in the thirteenth century; and in
some things, such as the status of the peasant, matters had greatly improved by the end of the Middle
Ages. But nobody can honestly say that Scholasticism had greatly improved by the end of the Middle
Ages. Nobody can tell how far the popular spirit of the Friars had helped the later popular medieval
movements; or how far this great Friar, with his luminous rules of justice and his lifelong sympathy with
the poor, may have indirectly contributed to the improvement that certainly occurred. But those who [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]