CP (#7) / Let's Learn Some Catholic Natural Law!
In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas encoded within the DNA of the medieval Catholic Church a detailed set of ideas that remain to this day the operative nomos (law/culture) of the Church.
A flashback from 2023!
You’d be forgiven were you not aware that Saint Thomas Aquinas dropped in (from Heaven) on the Met Gala last week, where — as you can see below in this red carpet photo — the Angelic Doctor rocked the ever-fashionable tonsure, low-stress black hoodie, and radiant gold nimbus. Channeling God's grace while simultaneously echoing the jewel-encrusted form-fitting gown of Met Ball co-chair, Michaela Coel. You go, Tom!
Actually, this image of Thomas Aquinas dates to the 15th century, part of a collection of nine works painted in a Gothic style by the remarkably lush Northern Italian Renaissance artist, Carlo Crivelli, and arranged in a two-tiered polyptych that was displayed for two and a half centuries on the high altar of the church of San Domenico in Ascoli Piceno, Italy. The altarpiece was dismantled sometime in the 18th century and subsequently sold to Russian aristocrat, Prince Anatole Demidoff. The National Gallery in London purchased the Demidoff Altarpiece in 1868.
As you can see below, the Demidoff possesses its own fashion forward pre-Raphaelite Met Gala vibe. Thomas Aquinas occupies the panel furthest to the right in the top row, alongside Saint Francis, Andrew the Apostle, and Saint Stephen. Below, one also finds paintings of John the Baptist, Saint Peter, the Virgin with Child, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and Saint Dominic.
Of course, the distinguishing feature of the Aquinas panel in the Crivelli polyptych is the display of the Saint balancing in each hand representations of the Book and the Church. These depictions contain considerable nuance. For example, if one looks closely at a high-resolution image of this painting, one sees within the entrance of the church two figures standing in shadow, one a priest and the other perhaps a woman.
We can see how vast Thomas’s grimy fingers appear in relation to these figures. Which suggests some symbolism. And begs some questions. What are these two little people doing? Why are they there? Why did Crivelli even bother? No one knows.
However, the mysteries matter less than the message, which is that in the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas encoded within the DNA of the medieval Catholic Church a detailed set of ideas that remain to this day the operative nomos (law/culture) of the Church.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the written works of Thomas Aquinas stand in the same relation to the Catholic Church of the High Middle Ages as the Gospels do to the early Christian foundations of the Catholic Church. Both are representations of the Word come to Flesh. But where the early Church embodied the word or message of God within the flesh of Christ rising into the City of God, the Catholic Church in the 13th century embodied the message of Thomas within emerging and legal and institutional forms of the Church’s enduring, earthbound mission in the City of Man.
In paintings such as the 15th century polyptych of Carlos Crivelli now known as the Demidoff Altarpiece, we catch a glimpse of Thomas Aquinas as he existed in the imagination of late medieval and early Renaissance Europe, the Angelic Doctor enfolding within his robes and balancing with ease the terrestrial mission of the Catholic Church and Natural Law moral philosophy (and theology).
During the High Middle Ages, Thomist natural law cemented itself as the moral and legal vision of the Catholic Church. These were the centuries when the Church reached its apogee in Europe and could for the first time truly imagine itself as a universal institution. Like flying buttresses, the abstract elegance and soaring aspirations of the logic that supported Thomist Natural Law precepts provided an enduring framework for conceptualizing what we now call “Western civilization.”
Here we can explore for the first time the entangled relations between two conceptions of “nature,” one spiritual and one carnal, and consider how the sensory reality and immediacy of the European Middle Ages challenged the more abstract and universal aspirations of the Catholic Church. As Keith Thomas wrote in Religion and the Decline of Magic, while officials wanted the faithful to worship their Creator and subject themselves to the Church as the vehicle of their salvation, the immediate, abundant, unmediated reality of the Creation itself would have typically overwhelmed the heavenly appeals.
Indeed, the rich and dense visual reality of life during the European Middle Ages reflected the direct influence of unmediated natural systems — climate, ecology, geology — that possessed their own mysterious internal causes and external effects. The apparent chaos of this natural environment challenged the universal governing aspirations of the terrestrial Church. The Thomist synthesis therefore exposed the rule of the Church and images of “the West” to fatal contradictions when the “natural order” — environmental, pagan, and otherwise — refused to conform to the formal imperatives of the natural law.
Tommaso d’Aquino was born into an aristocratic Italian family of means in 1225. His father was Landulf, a knight in service to Emperor Frederick II. His uncle was the abbot of Monte Cassino, the oldest Benedictine monastery. While Thomas’s brothers pursued military careers, his parents intended for Thomas to follow his uncle into the abbacy. They commenced his education at the age of five toward that end.
At the age of nineteen, however, Thomas resolved to join the Dominican order, against the wishes of his mother, Theodora. While journeying to Rome, his brothers seized Thomas and returned him to his parents at the castle of Monte San Giovanni Campano, where he was held prisoner for nearly one year.
Desperate to prevent Thomas from joining the Dominicans, two of his brothers famously hired a prostitute to seduce him. The official records of his canonization state that Thomas drove away the prostitute with a burning log. Immediately thereafter, he fell into a mystical ecstasy in which two angels girdled him with a belt of chastity. All efforts to dissuade Thomas having failed, Theodora finally arranged for him to escape at night through the window of his cell.
In 1245, at the age of twenty, Thomas joined the Faculty of the Arts at the University of Paris, where he likely first met the German Dominican scholar Albertus Magnus. In 1248, spurning Pope Innocent IV’s offer to appoint him abbot of Monte Cassino as a Dominican, Thomas joined Albertus in Cologne.
Because Thomas was quiet, fellow students imagined him to be slow. But Albertus prophetically exclaimed: "You call him the dumb ox, but in his teaching he will one day produce such a bellowing that it will be heard throughout the world."
And oh, Thomas did bellow, in a series of commentaries and compendia that culminated with his enormously influential (and enormously long) Summa Theologica. But many people bellow. What distinguishes the bellowing of Thomas was that it was systematic. As bellowing goes, it was synthetic, organized, unified, logical, coherent, and comprehensive.
If the world of Christian ideas exists in a land Before Thomas (BT) and after Thomas (AT), it is because Thomas built from the partial efforts of his predecessors an immensely solid, impermeable floor on which the rest of us have stood – without knowing that there might be any other way to stand – since his death (at the age of 49) in 1274. Nearly 800 years later, we still live within his system.
Here are two important perspectives on the Thomist synthesis.
First, Thomas consummated the prior efforts of medieval scholastic philosophers to reconcile faith and reason – essentially the claims of religion against those of science (as it was understood in the 13th century), the efforts to distinguish that which we can know through divine revelation from that which we can know by directly observing the unique “natures” of God’s creations. In Summa Theologica, Thomas relied heavily upon the authority of both Aristotle and Saint Augustine to confirm that reason and faith each properly rule within their own domains and that their relationship to each other is ultimately complementary and mutually reinforcing.
Second, Thomas deduced pretty much his entire body of work from first principles (uncaused causes, first things, etc.), perhaps not fully dependent on scripture and revelation but by definition in harmony with them, an expression of God’s eternal will, and therefore universal and the opposite of provisional or contingent. The most important of these first things is that God created everything that exists under heaven, that each of these things possessed a fixed nature bestowed by God, and that God distinguished humans from the rest of his creation by making them in his own image.
In an enormous corpus of more than eight million words, Thomas unspooled a moral philosophy derived from these premises via the serial deployment of syllogisms, a logical process that required each statement to conform closely and deterministically to the statement which came before. In the end, the success of his project required formal rigor from the syllogistic logic and full acceptance of the initial premises – the cosmology – that underpinned them.
The Catholic Church certainly accepts the premises and underlying cosmology of Thomist moral philosophy. The rest of us don’t have to. But most of us do anyway.
Catholicpunk Draft: #3
March 23, 2025