Most of us wonder how to make sense of the apparent moral excellences or virtues of those who have different visions of the good life or different religious commitments than our own. Rather than flattening or ignoring the deep difference between various visions of the good life, as is so often done, this book turns to the medieval Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas to find a better way. Thomas, it argues, shows us how to welcome the outsider and her virtue as an expression rather than a betrayal of one's own distinctive vision. It shows how Thomas, driven by a Christian commitment to charity and especially informed by Augustine, synthesized Augustinian and Aristotelian elements to construct an ethics that does justice—in love—to insiders and outsiders alike. Decosimo offers the first analysis of Thomas on pagan virtue and a reinterpretation of Thomas's ethics while providing a model for our own efforts to articulate a truthful hospitality and do ethics in our pluralist, globalized world.
Most of us wonder how to make sense of the apparent moral excellences or virtues of those who have different visions of the good life or different religious commitments than our own. Rather than flattening or ignoring the deep difference between various visions of the good life, as is so often done, this book turns to the medieval Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas to find a better way. Thomas, it argues, shows us how to welcome the outsider and her virtue as an expression rather than a betrayal of one's own distinctive vision. It shows how Thomas, driven by a Christian commitment to charity and especially informed by Augustine, synthesized Augustinian and Aristotelian elements to construct an ethics that does justice—in love—to insiders and outsiders alike. Decosimo offers the first analysis of Thomas on pagan virtue and a reinterpretation of Thomas's ethics while providing a model for our own efforts to articulate a truthful hospitality and do ethics in our pluralist, globalized world.
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Most of us wonder how to make sense of the apparent moral excellences or virtues of those who have different visions of the good life or different religious commitments than our own. Rather than flattening or ignoring the deep difference between various visions of the good life, as is so often done, this book turns to the medieval Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas to find a better way. Thomas, it argues, shows us how to welcome the outsider and her virtue as an expression rather than a betrayal of one's own distinctive vision. It shows how Thomas, driven by a Christian commitment to charity and especially informed by Augustine, synthesized Augustinian and Aristotelian elements to construct an ethics that does justice—in love—to insiders and outsiders alike. Decosimo offers the first analysis of Thomas on pagan virtue and a reinterpretation of Thomas's ethics while providing a model for our own efforts to articulate a truthful hospitality and do ethics in our pluralist, globalized world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804791700 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/23/2014 |
| Series: | Encountering Traditions |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 376 |
| File size: | 772 KB |
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Ethics as a Work of Charity
Thomas Aquinas and Pagan Virtue
By David Decosimo
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9170-0
CHAPTER 1
THOMAS AND HIS OUTSIDERS
If what is said about the Jews ... is true, no punishment would be sufficiently great or sufficiently worthy of their crime.... We herewith order ... that on the first Saturday of the Lent to come, in the morning, while the Jews are gathered in the synagogues, you shall ... seize all the books of the Jews who live in your districts, and have these books carefully guarded in the possession of the Dominican and Franciscan Friars.
So wrote Gregory IX in June of 1239 in a letter sent throughout Roman territories in concern that Jewish devotion to Talmud was corrupting their loyalty to Torah—and by extension their identity as proto-Christians (TAJ, 25).
Understandably, the idea that we could learn something about navigating difference from a medieval theologian is bound to strike some as odd or even pernicious. After all, weren't medieval Christians—especially Dominicans—notoriously intolerant of Jews? And doesn't Thomas bear some responsibility for that?
Consider Jeremy Cohen. In several influential books, he has argued that Thomas's period saw not only a marked rise in the persecution of Jews but the birth of a new brand of anti-Judaism—one aimed at nothing less than the annihilation of Judaism and culminating in the expulsion of Jews from various European realms. During Thomas's era, "ecclesiastical authorities took concerted steps to proselytize among the Jews en masse, persecuting the Talmud ..., exploiting inquisitorial jurisdiction to harass entire Jewish communities, invading synagogues to preach to Jewish worshipers, and coercing leading rabbis to participate in public, officially sanctioned disputations." In sum, "the very legitimacy of the European Jewish community [was] called into question." Leading this charge, he contends, were the Dominicans and Franciscans who "developed, refined, and sought to implement a new Christian ideology ... that allotted the Jews no legitimate right to exist in European society" (FJ, 14). "By the end of the early fourteenth century," he continues, "[they] openly advocated that Latin Christendom rid itself of its Jewish population, whether through missionizing, forced expulsions, or physical harassment that would induce conversion or flight" (14).
In all this, Cohen claims, Thomas Aquinas plays a central role. He does first through his alleged association with Raymond de Peñafort, whom Cohen identifies as central to the upsurge in medieval anti-Judaism and its horrors. Declaring that "Raymond prevailed upon Thomas to compose his Summa contra gentiles as a means of attracting converts to Christianity" (105), he suggests that Thomas shared, shaped, and helped legitimate Raymond's attack (106, 124). On another level, Thomas is culpable in a far weightier and more direct sense. "In contrast to ... theologians from Augustine through the end of the twelfth century," Cohen contends, "Aquinas taught that [the Jewish] sages knew that Jesus was the messiah and crucified him in spite of that knowledge. The disbelief of the Jews derived, therefore not from ignorance but from a deliberate defiance of the truth" (124–25). Until the thirteenth century, Cohen claims, Jews had been given a right to exist and worship amidst Christians thanks to Augustine's vision of their ongoing role in salvation history. Thomas, however, departs radically from Augustine's understanding of the Jews. His teaching is an invitation—even a goading—to their abuse. In Cohen's story, then, Thomas may not have been at the forefront of Jewish persecution but, especially through his treatment of Jewish culpability for the Crucifixion, he did as much as anyone to foster it.
To be sure, even if Cohen were right, we could still learn from Thomas on pagan virtue—aware, perhaps, of the irony. Still, for many, willingness to listen to Thomas on our topic requires considering claims like Cohen's. More importantly, between us and Thomas stand a millennium's distance and interpretive cacophony. Understanding Thomas thus requires situating him in relation to the dominant ethos and practices of his day in regard to nonChristians—above all, his world's most important living unbelievers: Jews and Muslims. While such contextualization does assuage worries that he's a distasteful teacher, more to the point, it equips us to read him rightly—as one who, in his era, leaned toward justice and advocated toleration, opposing what he rightly judged as evil, especially when it came to the treatment of outsiders. Perhaps most suggestive in this regard is the fact that three centuries later, Dominicans nourished on and drawing from his thought would number among the only Europeans to oppose the conquest of the Americas.
Thomas's teachings on the treatment of outsiders is vitally distinct from his vision of their moral capacities. Yet, by focusing on the former, this chapter represents our first step toward grasping the latter. The story it tells is meant to take us to the point where we are not merely willing but able to give Thomas our ear on pagan virtue. Neither fully righteous nor altogether unjust, Thomas is, for us, an outsider—but one from whom, if we imitate his own forbearance and charity, we can learn.
Thomas and His Outsiders
At the time Gregory issued his letter, Thomas would have been about fourteen, a recent arrival at the university in Naples. Only in Paris were the orders followed. And, after notorious public examination and disputations in which the Talmud was put "on trial," in 1242 roughly ten thousand seized manuscripts were burned (FJ, 63). Thomas meanwhile was busy studying Aristotelian philosophy, Ibn Rushd's commentaries, and the Jew, Maimonides. Paris, where Jews were persecuted in the street and study of Aristotle's natural philosophy and metaphysics was officially forbidden, was, in more than one sense, a long way away (Torrell, STA, 7).
In 1244, shortly after arriving in Naples, Thomas joined the Dominicans—a young, austere, intellectually serious order in which "everything else—organization, studies, rules about poverty and liturgy—was subordinated to [the] one purpose" of preaching the Gospel. The decision was radical enough to cause his family to kidnap him, holding him under "house arrest" in an effort to return him to the respectable, prestigious path they had charted for him when they had first placed their little five-year-old as an oblate at Monte Cassino, the nearby Benedictine monastery. It was a path that would almost certainly terminate in his installment as abbot. Temporarily "imprisoned," surely Thomas had time to reflect on the strange journey that had exposed him, before he was even 20, to two radically different systems of thought and visions of life—first at Monte Cassino as a little boy, to "the age-old tradition of Latin monasticism, richly indebted to Augustine and Christian neoPlatonism," and then in Naples, to "the pagan philosophy of Aristotle, brought to the West by Jewish and especially Muslim scholars." These two traditions—and the relations between them—would be central to Thomas's work for the rest of his life.
The thirteenth century was the height of the medieval era. At Paris and its university, Thomas sat at its pinnacle. There, starting in 1245, he studied theology and Aristotle's ethics under Albert the Great, while continuing his philosophy training with the arts faculty (STA, 23–25). After a stint in Cologne, Thomas returned to Paris. Lecturing on Lombard's Sentences, he set two trajectories that would mark his entire career.
First, amidst tensions between the arts and theology faculty over Aristotle's philosophy and skepticism even from fellow friars, Thomas included more than two thousand quotations from the Philosopher—more than any other author. Eight hundred of these, the lion's share, were from the Ethics alone (41). Secondly, he imposed on theSentences' structure his Dionysian vision of divine exitus and reditus, exit and return. As Son proceeds from Father, and Spirit from both, and as Son in Spirit "returns," so, Thomas proposes, should all things be seen as coming from and returning to God. Theology therefore treats primarily of the Triune God as Alpha and Omega but also of everything as ordered to him. The very Triune life, both immanent and economic, is distantly mirrored by the movement of all things. Thomas structures his work to trace that reality (43). These two themes, the embrace of Aristotle, especially his ethics, and this profoundly Trinitarian theological vision, characterize Thomas's most mature theological reflection, blooming fully in the Summa theologiae. Two minor works also stem from this time, each heavily influenced by the Muslims Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd (47–50, esp. 49). Like his early appropriation of Aristotle, this engagement with Islamic philosophy would endure.
In 1256, Thomas became magister in sacra pagina, Master of Holy Scripture, a full member of the Paris theology faculty called to lecture on Scripture and theology, engage in disputations, and preach. All of this was in addition to his particularly Dominican duties of hearing confession, offering spiritual direction, and forming others to do the same. Thomas returned to Italy, to the Dominican house of study at Orvieto, in 1261. There he began the Summa contra Gentiles. While controversy abounds over how to understand the work, it is almost certainly not best understood as a "missionary manual" for disputation with Muslims (104–7). Even the title has little claim to authenticity.
At Orvieto, Thomas trained young Dominicans, almost all of whom would never attend university. In that context, faced with the inadequacy of the materials at his disposal, the unpreparedness of his students, and the weight of what was at stake for them and their future flocks, it is nearly certain that the idea for the Summa theologiae was conceived: a work was needed that would prepare students well for lives of service to the Church in hearing confession and preaching. Thomas intended to write it.
Imagining the arid, formulaic, and even chillingly mechanistic approach to caring for souls that would follow from a formation that treated moral theology in isolation from its place in God's overarching work of redemption, Thomas sought a curriculum in which ethics was inextricably integrated with a synoptic theological vision. In Rome, that work began, and by 1268 he had completed the Prima Pars, or "first part," of the Summa —along with a commentary on Aristotle's De Anima. So began his practice of preparing for work in the Summa by studying Aristotle's parallel treatments of those topics—the De Anima commentary, for instance, coincided with his treatment of the soul in Summa theologiae I, and, later, his Ethics commentary would coincide with his work on the Prima Secundae. In all, Thomas would undertake twelve such commentaries.
In 1268, Thomas returned to Paris—and to controversy. For us, the most important concerned the theology faculty's growing hostility to the study and thought of Aristotle, a stance even many Dominicans shared. Against Aristotle, most held it was rationally demonstrable that the world was not eternal. Defending Aristotle without betraying Scripture, Thomas argued this was not so: Aristotle's position was refutable by revelation alone. On strictly rational grounds, he claimed, it was indeterminate whether the earth had a beginning. It would subject theology—and the faith itself—to ridicule to claim otherwise. Further, it would be an injustice to Aristotle. That, Thomas would not countenance.
Remarkably, amidst the controversies Thomas continued his massive output, in eighteen months completing his Ethics commentary, his De virtutibus, and the entire second part of the Summa—itself nearly thirteen hundred double-columned pages in the standard English translation. Before 1272's end, surely exhausted, he returned to Naples and, following a mystical experience in December 1273, stopped work altogether. In light of his vision, he said, all his work seemed mere "straw." On March 7, 1274, Thomas, still in his forties, died.
Thomas and the Jews
In 1199, only fifty years prior to Gregory's letter, matters for Parisian Jews had been different. It was in that year that Pope Innocent III had issued Sicut Iudeis, which would become the most frequently promulgated papal bull concerning the Jews in the medieval era. Addressed to all Christians, under threat of excommunication, it prohibits forced conversion or baptism and declares that "no Christian shall presume to wound [Jewish] person[s], or kill them, or rob them of their money, or change the good customs which they have thus far enjoyed" and that "no one shall disturb them in any way by means of sticks and stones [while they celebrate their festivals]" (CJ, 92–93). Steven Boguslawski notes that in issuing this bull, Innocent III was situating himself in a strong tradition of toleration of the Jews that extended back to Gregory the Great's recognition of the impropriety of compulsion and the necessity of gentleness and charity in efforts to sway "even those at odds with the Christian religion to the unity of the faith" (TAJ, 21–22). Yet, Boguslawski notes that by the late thirteenth century the repeated reissuance of Innocent's bull, each time with novel proscriptions of still different forms of persecution, testifies to growing hostility toward Jews—animus so great that "by the end of the thirteenth century [they were] ... beyond any aid from ... Sicut Iudeis." Still, even as late as 1233, the very Gregory who would eventually order the seizure of Jewish texts issued a bull "to end the beatings, tortures, despoiling, and unjust imprisonment of certain Jews" by various French civil authorities (TAJ, 24). Throughout, the impetus to protect the Jews was rooted most deeply in the Christian conception of their role as living witnesses to God's fidelity in their own obedience to the Mosaic law, their subservience a just result of their supposed rejection of Jesus as Messiah.
It is in this context that we can, on one level, understand Gregory's letter. For Gregory, Jewish fidelity to Talmud alongside or instead of Torah constituted a betrayal of their own covenantal relationship with God and a displacement from their assigned role in the Christian narrative. Rabbinic teaching could thus seem to threaten the Christian vision of salvation history, to violate the very "Jewishness" of the Jews. To the mind of certain Christians, then, the Talmud was a threat to Jew and Christian alike—and so the Talmud and Jewish adherence to it became the target of Christian attack. Innocent IV continued Gregory's trajectory with a directive in 1244 for the French king to burn Jewish books, citing in particular their crime of "[throwing] away and [despising] the law of Moses and the prophets, and [following] some tradition of their elders" (CJ, 251). While the disruption of the Christian narrative of Jewish identity may have been a chief cause of the persecution, Gregory and Innocent both seem to have acted under the impression that the Talmud was largely comprised of attacks on and blasphemies against Christianity and especially the person of Jesus. Thus, responding to the protest of Jewish scholars, in 1247 Innocent IV instructed his representative in France, the archbishop of Rouen, Odo, to return to the Jews those books that were deemed no threat. Odo, however, took the occasion merely to condemn many of the books a second time. Though we do not know what his role might have been, among the forty-four people enlisted in the process of reexamination was the man who would soon become Thomas's teacher, Albert the Great. Such was the atmosphere in Paris one year before Thomas's arrival.
Thomas was not a champion of the Jews. Few if any thirteenth century Christians were. Perhaps the fairest assessment is forwarded by Torrell, Thomas's authoritative biographer. "Thomas," he says, "is sometimes hard on the Jews" (STA, 32). Torrell here judges Thomas in relation to our context—and his pronouncement, I think, gets it about right. Thomas is hard on the Jews. He does not hate Jews and would never countenance their persecution. But he does bear the marks of his age.
Thus, it is troubling to hear the Thomas of 1271 agree that Jews should have to wear distinguishing clothing—even as, citing Jewish law, he notes that their own law commands them to do so (ADB 8). And it is disturbing that he would favorably cite the dictum that the "Jews are sentenced to perpetual servitude as punishment for their guilt"—even as he insists that they never should be deprived of the goods they need to live and should be allowed to earn their living by honorable work, never forced into usury (ADB 1). Yet these remarks, which are culled from Ad ducissam Brabantiae, his very brief response to eight legislative and financial questions posed in a letter by Margaret of Constantinople, are actually relatively progressive for their time (STA, 218–9). Indeed, Thomas's reply is remarkable only in its departures from standard anti-Jewish practices and its relative friendliness toward and protection of Jews. Further, Thomas indicates that he writes in haste and feels unqualified to render these judgments. Torrell correctly notes that while this letter is often called the De regimine Iudaeorum, or On the Rule of Jews, "the name is improper because, for more than half of its short length, [it] speaks of the non-Jewish subjects of the recipient" (218).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ethics as a Work of Charity by David Decosimo. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Abbreviations, Translation, and Citation Matters,
Introduction: Intrusions of Grace,
I. ETHICS AS A WORK OF FAITH,
1. Thomas and His Outsiders,
2. God, Good, and the Desire of All Things,
3. The Perfection of Habit,
4. Pagan Virtue: Perfect, Unified, and True,
II. ETHICS AND THE THINGS OF THIS WORLD,
5. "The Virtue of Many Gentiles",
6. Boundaries and Ends,
7. Honest Goods,
8. Infidelitas and Final End Conceptions,
III. ETHICS AS A WORK OF CHARITY,
9. Sin and the Limits of Virtue,
10. The Other Face of Grace,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,