De locis theologicis

Response to the first argument. First, then, they oppose the authority of the ancient fathers to us. In doing so, they wrong the ancients. For what else does it mean to say that the fathers condemned all human sciences than that they were not only unlearned but also strangers to humanity? Since a human being shares in reason, he sees consequences and the principles and causes of things, investigates their development and antecedents, compares similarities, and joins and connects invisible things to visible ones. Through this inquiry and investigation of the mind, the natural disciplines arise in a person; I do not understand what anyone who blames their study thinks should be praised. Since it would take too long to cite other passages from these same fathers in which human learning is commended, I will mention only one from Augustinus, in the very book Contra Felicem Manichaeum whose testimony these men especially raise against us. Although Augustinus had rebuked the heretics who dared to set the promise of reason above the authority of the Church, he nevertheless commends natural arguments in their proper place and order, saying: “The most merciful commander of the faith fortified the Church through the most celebrated assemblies of peoples and nations, and through the very seats of the apostles, with the stronghold of authority; and through a smaller number of devout and learned people he also armed it with the most abundant resources of invincible reason. But the most upright discipline is to receive the weak into the fortress of faith, so that, once they are safe there, we may fight on their behalf with the strongest reasoning.” From this passage readers can see what Augustinus thinks. When reason is compared with authority, reason’s appearance indeed lies low, while authority prevails. Yet he nowhere separates these two powers of argument as if someone could be a theologian without relying on reason and authority together. He arms the unlearned with faith, and the learned with reason as well. The most learned men, therefore, do not condemn human disciplines or the natural arguments drawn from them; they condemn those who, though outside Catholic unity and boasting of the Christian name, dare to misrepresent the unlearned as rational. They feel themselves utterly defeated if their authority is compared with Catholic authority, as Augustinus wrote to Dioscorus. The fathers also condemn those who prefer philosophy to the Gospels, for whom Averroes is Paulus, Alexander Aphrodisaeus is Petrus, Aristoteles is Christ, and Plato is not divine but a god. We ourselves saw many such people, especially in Italy, who neglected Sacred Scripture and clung instead to the teachings of these philosophers as if to the Sirens’ rocks. After taking even the hats and mitres, they impersonated not prophets, apostles, and evangelists, but Cicerones, Platos, and Aristoteles. Our fathers also rebuke priests who indulge too much in the books of philosophers. Those who had to be occupied with most serious and necessary duties did not want philosophical study to impede them. Basilius and Gregorius

said farewell to all the books of secular wisdom for thirteen years, so that they might devote themselves entirely to Sacred Scripture. Hieronymus also testifies about himself in epist. ad Galat. that for fifteen years he did not even take a book by a pagan sage into his hands. Clemens Alexandrinus allows people of this kind, who ought to be perfect and accomplished teachers in the Church, to study philosophy in their leisure only to refresh their minds. Since wisdom sent the disciplines as handmaids to be called into the citadel, the fathers warned that what are called the liberal arts must serve theology, not rule it. A student of those arts must take care not to neglect the mistress—that is, true wisdom—while enjoying the charms of her handmaids. He must also ensure that if the Egyptian Hagar becomes arrogant in Abraham’s embrace, she is cast out and exiled, and is not allowed either to make fun of Isaac’s simplicity or to despise the goodness of Sara. Let the mistress afflict and correct her handmaid; let her keep her in hand and use her as she pleases. If modest, she will be useful; indulged beyond measure, she is harmful. For our life is short, and necessarily the more time we give to human studies, the less we give to divine studies, to which the religion of Christ has consecrated us. Those who devote themselves too much to the liberal disciplines generally absorb errors that are difficult to wash away. A provision to this effect was also made by law at the Concilium Lateranense under Leo X, sess. 10. We also have a most holy law which trains in these disciplines only young people—and not all of them, but those with ability—while barring older people and those slower in talent from such study. But if people break this law or spend more time and care than is reasonable on philosophy and dialectic, neither speculative philosophy nor scholastic theology, which claims philosophy for its own use, should be treated with contempt because of their fault. The sayings familiar even in ordinary speech do not escape us: “Nothing in excess”; “Moderation is best in all things”; and what Horatius expressed in verse: “There is a measure in things; there are, in the end, fixed bounds,” and other weighty sayings. Readers know the poem. We blame both faults: those who pore over the books of Aristoteles or Plato day and night, and, much more, those who have no knowledge of natural things and, after tasting Sacred Scripture, as they say, with the tips of their lips, declare themselves accomplished theologians while neglecting philosophy as unfit for theological study. But we seem to have said enough about the testimonies of the saints. Response to the second argument. The first testimony from Ecclesiasticus is raised from Sacred Scripture. We will easily grasp its true and genuine meaning if we keep in mind the aim and purpose of the whole book. Salomon’s chief purpose in that book is to explain what the human end is, for the sake of which humanity was created—that is, where human happiness lies. Everything else Ecclesiastes discusses in his sermon ultimately relates to and revolves around this. He therefore places this general statement at the very beginning: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” meaning that none of the goods of this world can provide a person’s end or true happiness. The Sage calls all things vain in this sense. This is not unreasonable: a thing is usually defined as vain if it lacks an end or is useless for the end being sought. Those things are rightly called vain, then, because if a person seeks rest in them he will not find it, if he expects happiness he will expect it in vain, and if he wishes to pursue and attain his end he will come to nothing.

Having set this theme at the beginning of his sermon, encompassing all the goods of this world, Salomon then treats each one in turn and shows that human happiness is not located in wisdom, possessions, wealth, or pleasure. In the first chapter he shows that a person is not made happy by human disciplines. It is not for this place to explain how aptly and divinely he proves this. Readers need only be warned not to be misled by Aristoteles’ varied error, since he placed the highest human good in contemplation of the highest things. If he were speaking about minds released from the body and seeking the happiness of the life to come, he would certainly say something for us, that is, for the family of D. Thomas. But since he says one thing about the soul’s immortality here and another there, and does not always say the same thing or reveal his chief opinion, it is difficult to know what an impious—or at least changeable and uncertain—man, lacking reliable means to judge, might have said about another life. The life to come was either not clear to him or entirely unknown; those means of judgment were the instruments he used to assess everything. He is therefore speaking about the happiness of the present life. In his Ethics and Politics he accordingly requires possessions, wealth, friends, health, and other such transient and temporal goods as aids to happiness. In lib. De bona fortuna he denies that anyone can be happy without external goods, over which Fortune, as he says, is mistress. We cannot doubt Aristoteles’ judgment about this; we may perhaps doubt whether he was right. But whoever understands this first chapter of Ecclesiastes will undoubtedly be able to recognize Aristoteles’ error easily. What kind of happiness would a mind attain by contemplating the things above and beyond heaven while burdened—indeed, crushed—by the great weight of the body? “The thoughts of mortals are fearful, and our plans uncertain. For the corruptible body weighs down the soul, and this earthly dwelling presses down the mind that thinks of many things. We can scarcely judge what is on earth, and we find what is before us only with difficulty; but who will investigate what is in heaven?” Ecclesiastes also says in chapter one: “All things are difficult; a person cannot explain them in speech.” This is a remarkable judgment, worthy of Salomon, which declares what Aristoteles himself said gravely and wisely: our mind’s vision is dim before the most evident things, just as the owl’s eyes are dim before the brightness of the sun. Some therefore rightly wonder at Aristoteles’ advice: although he knew how weak our intellectual powers were, how narrow, fleeting, and unreliable our memory, how blunt, encumbered, and feeble our acumen, and how sluggish and slow our diligence, he placed happiness in something so faint and slight in this life, so obscure and imperfect, so weak and unstable, so unsuited by itself to making us happy, and finally so limited to a few people that it seems to have almost none of the features included in the definition of true happiness. For what kind of happiness is so often interrupted and yields to the most contemptible things? What kind is not a common good of the human race, but something that very few can attain and keep? If all people sought it as their end, as they should, the whole commonwealth would perish. What kind increases human labor rather than rest? What does not satisfy human desire but inflames it? For as long as the human mind lives here, it can be tormented by the pursuit of knowledge but cannot be satisfied.

Let it therefore stand that the happiness of this life does not consist in the use of first philosophy, that is, contemplation of immaterial things, since illness can remove it, pain interrupt it, and poverty disturb it. For if Aristoteles requires a harmonious combination of other goods for this happiness, he imagines a happy person such as, I think, no one has ever been or, as I can confirm, ever will be. Moreover, as Aristoteles reports in lib. De bona fortuna, where there is the greatest understanding, there is the least fortune; where there is the greatest fortune, there is the least understanding. Ecclesiastes says in cap. 9: “I saw that neither bread goes to the wise, nor riches to the learned, nor favor to the skilled, but time and chance happen to all.” How can we say, then, that the goods of fortune are necessary for happiness, when they are subject to chance and come more often to the foolish than to the wise? How much more wisely Salomon placed the human end that can be sought in this mortal life in fear and love of God! “Fear God,” he says, “and keep his commandments; this is the whole human being.” All the rest of Divine Scripture agrees with this judgment: “Blessed is the man who fears the Lord; he will greatly delight in his commandments”; and “Blessed are all who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways”; and “Blessed are the undefiled in the way,” etc. The Lord says in Matthaeus: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice”; and “Blessed are the pure in heart.” Surely in this present age this is either happiness or there is no happiness at all. Through it we attain true and perfect happiness, and through it we draw as close as possible to the supremely blessed one, that is, to God. Just as something is hotter the closer and more similar it is to what is hottest, so the closer and more similar a person is to God in this life, the happier and more blessed he will be. The Apostle Paulus also said—not only D. Thomas—that in this life love of God is superior to knowledge and learning. The happiness of this life therefore lies in the love of God, not in knowledge. If knowledge of earthly and heavenly things, produced in a person by natural disciplines, cannot make anyone happy, it does not follow that Salomon condemned it. He calls the pursuit of human knowledge a most miserable occupation because it is burdensome. In Scripture “evil” is sometimes used not for fault but for punishment. He also calls this pursuit vanity because it does not provide a person with his end and is useless for attaining true happiness. If we misuse this testimony against the liberal sciences, let us also condemn possessions, wealth, kingdoms, arts, and everything done under the sun. For the Sage said the same things about them too. Since that would be most foolish, let us admit that nothing can be proved from the words of Ecclesiasticus against human disciplines. Response to the third argument. Even less can anything be proved from Proverbs. Those words plainly concern blind pleasure, which Plato in Cicero calls the bait of evils, because people are caught by it as fish are by a hook. Philosophy is not that wandering, babbling harlot, impatient of quiet, shameless, coaxing, flattering, and ready to deceive souls. If anything is like that, it is Thamar, who sat at the crossroads to conceive offspring, and to whom the studious and faithful Iudas turned; from her he fathered Phares and Zaram, who are mentioned in the Gospels. The Muses are not Sirens, as Pythagoras says: they are chaste, not harlots; truthful, not deceitful. Those who delight in the songs of the Sirens are at fault; those who love the Muses are not. In epist. ad Coloss., according to Clemens himself, the Apostle does not condemn true philosophy, that is, the philosophy that thinks truly about natural things, but the Epicurean kind, which removes providence, counts pleasure among the gods, and believes that nothing exists apart from bodily things. Paulus therefore condemns this and similar doctrines of philosophers, which their authors sell under the name of philosophy, although in fact they are nothing of the kind, but are traditions of ignorant people, as the Apostle calls them. But true and

natural philosophy is received not from human tradition but from God’s revelation, as we showed above from the testimony of this same Apostle. But since the same chapter also says, “I say this so that no one may deceive you with lofty speech,” it is astonishing that Luther, Philippus, and others—whom I do not wish to name here and attack as heretics, since they are still considered Catholics—did not condemn eloquence and every lofty style of speaking. It is absurd for people who like the disciplines of words to dislike knowledge of things. But, someone says, dangerous curiosity and excessive boldness in defining obscure matters have arisen for us from the study of philosophy. He adds this while pleading that he be spared the charge of supreme folly and wickedness, claiming that he does not think philosophy should be condemned altogether. Who cannot see what sort of slander this is and what sort of man uses it? It is not open, candid, straightforward, or just, nor does it befit a good man; it is rather shrewd, obscure, crafty, deceitful, malicious, cunning, scheming, and sly. Believe me, faults do not arise from the study of philosophy but from error and ignorance. What could be more opposed to philosophy than pursuing vain and dangerous things, or defining without any hesitation what has not been sufficiently examined or understood? What does he mean by saying that he does not think philosophy should be condemned altogether? Which part of philosophy, then, does he condemn? Does he, like Luther, condemn the part that contemplates and investigates? Let him explain and examine his understanding, so that he may see what sort, form, and conception of philosophy it contains. We do not call Stoic, Platonic, Pythagorean, or Aristotelian teaching “philosophy” in the popular way. Like people skilled in definition, if we interpret the word, we call it the pursuit of wisdom; if we ask about the thing itself, we call it knowledge of human and divine, earthly and heavenly matters. To condemn this, whether altogether or even in part, is either conspicuous folly or open malice. Augustinus, lib. 1 De morib. Eccles. Cathol., cap. 21, understands that we must avoid curious investigation of nature and excessive love of earthly wisdom, not true philosophy, which is a moderate love of wisdom. Response to the fourth argument. What is brought forward from the first epistle to the Corinthians cannot trouble us. When he says, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,” it is as if he said, “I will obscure the wisdom of the wise.” How? By illuminating the world with the greater light of teaching, beside which all the teaching of philosophers seems to be nothing, just as the sun is said to put out the light of stars and lamps with its own brilliance. God rejected the prudence of the prudent because he chose only what is foolish in the world to confound the wise. In the same sense he is said to have rejected the strong and powerful, because he chose weak and lowly apostles so that God’s power might shine more clearly in the preaching of the Gospel. Yet Clemens, in lib. 1 and 5 Stromatum, teaches that perhaps this is not said of the truly wise and prudent, but of those who merely seem wise and prudent to themselves. The Gospel is not called foolishness because it is foolish, but because it seemed so to the wise of this world. The passage “knowledge puffs up” is very easy to understand. The Apostle no more condemns knowledge here than someone would condemn wealth, kingdoms, beauty, strength, abstinence, or virginity if he declared that all these things puff people up. Clemens Alexandrinus explains it in lib. 2 Stromatum of those who think themselves wise but are proud, knowing nothing in truth and sick with questions. This interpretation is made more probable by what the Apostle immediately adds: “If anyone thinks he “The question is why the Apostle, after saying, ‘According to the faith of God’s elect and the knowledge of the truth,’ added, ‘which is according to piety.’ Is there some truth that is not grounded in piety, so that he now distinguishes the knowledge of truth according to piety? There is indeed truth that has no piety: for example, if someone knows grammar or dialectic in order to speak correctly and judge between false and true. Geometry, arithmetic, and music also contain truth in their own discipline, but this is not the knowledge of piety. The knowledge of piety is to know the law, understand the prophets, believe the Gospel, and not be ignorant of the apostles. Without piety, knowledge of truth gives pleasure for the present, but it has no eternal reward.” Thus far Hieronymus. The Apostle therefore calls those “sound words” which bring salvation to the soul, and “pious” those which make people devout and religious. Human knowledge does not provide this, but that does not make it useless to a theologian.

knows anything, he has not yet understood how he ought to know.” True knowledge, then, does not puff up; what puffs up is what seems to be knowledge but is not. In lib. 7 Stromatum he explains “puffing up” anew as making those who possess it think highly of themselves. He cites in this connection Ecclesiast. 4: ή σοφία ύιούς έαυτής άνύψωσε, that is, “wisdom puffed up her sons,” as the translator renders it. Others translate it as “exalted,” while Hieronymus says “gave life.” The verb άνυψόω means to raise or lift up. As for the testimony from 1 ad Tim., cap. 6, divus Hieronymus replies in Comment. super epist. ad Titum., cap. 1, in these words: “The question is why the Apostle, after saying, ‘According to the faith of God’s elect and the knowledge of the truth,’ added, ‘which is according to piety.’ Is there some truth that is not grounded in piety, so that he now distinguishes the knowledge of truth according to piety? There is indeed truth that has no piety: for example, if someone knows grammar or dialectic in order to speak correctly and judge between false and true. Geometry, arithmetic, and music also contain truth in their own discipline, but this is not the knowledge of piety. The knowledge of piety is to know the law, understand the prophets, believe the Gospel, and not be ignorant of the apostles. Without piety, knowledge of truth gives pleasure for the present, but it has no eternal reward.” Thus far Hieronymus. The Apostle therefore calls those “sound words” which bring salvation to the soul, and “pious” those which make people devout and religious. Human knowledge does not provide this, but that does not make it useless to a theologian. Response to the fifth argument. But the apostles were not trained in human letters. I admit it. Christ did not teach them geometry, astrology, or physics. I admit this too. The Holy Spirit taught them all truth, but did not teach them philosophy, arithmetic, or geography. That is also true. Christ and the apostles handed down to us not the art of dialectic but bare knowledge, preserved by faith and good works. I do not dispute it. Therefore these disciplines are useful to no Christian teacher. This is what I deny most firmly. For, as Clemens says, the Holy Spirit fully supplied the apostles with everything necessary for understanding Sacred Scripture and teaching people of every kind. We, however, who do not have this special gift of the Spirit, if we are unskilled and ignorant of human letters, cannot properly understand divine matters or be accomplished teachers in the Church. Christ and the apostles also did not teach us human disciplines so that our faith would rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God. They wished to teach nothing except what was necessary for salvation. Otherwise, if this argument stands, let us be ignorant of grammar because the apostles were not grammarians; let us be barbarians because the apostles were not eloquent. Let us bring forward nothing carefully considered, deliberated, or prepared, since the apostles spoke wisely and spontaneously, on the spot, to overcome heretics, philosophers, and tyrants. Augustinus explained in Ioannem how they learned all truth. There are undoubtedly certain human truths that we learn usefully even though the apostles were not taught them. It is so evident that truth is subject to human disciplines, which they treat and investigate, that it would be foolish for me to try to prove it or for others to deny it. In another book we will explain fully and carefully when, where, and with what kinds of people a theologian should use human disciplines, for this too is at issue in the argument. For now, then, we pass over these questions, whose explanation is both more important and belongs to another time.

Response to the sixth argument. Only the final argument remains for us to answer. Clemens Alexandrinus does this ingeniously in lib. 1 Stromatum, saying: “Truth is not destroyed by removing philosophy; rather, philosophy is found to cooperate with and assist it, just as the first and second steps help someone ascending to an upper room, and grammar helps the person who will study philosophy. Sight and hearing also contribute to truth, but the mind is what apprehends it suitably and naturally. Clarity also helps to convey truth, and dialectic keeps us from being overthrown by heresies. The teaching of the Savior is perfect in itself and needs nothing, since it is God’s power and wisdom. Philosophy’s approach does not make truth more powerful, but it weakens sophistical argument against it; driving off the deceitful snares set against truth, it is a hedge and fence around a vineyard. Truth from faith is necessary for life like bread; the learning that precedes it is like a side dish and dessert. At the end of a meal, a little cake is pleasant, as Pindarus the Theban says.” Thus far Clemens. This concludes what we have to say about the eighth source. Any remaining matters will be discussed in the ninth source, which follows immediately.

ON THE AUTHORITY OF PHILOSOPHERS WHO FOLLOW NATURE AS THEIR GUIDE