Much is made in modern writing of how depressing the world is because modern men have “lost God.”. But a corollary to this that is not as widely perceived is just as depressing and just as catastrophic: the loss of the external and “real” world. Shut a generation or two up inside themselves for long enough, and they are likely to begin to think that suicide is a preferable alternative to the “world” in which they live. If our philosophical system begins with human thought and human perception and then critique human thought and human perception, we can never get to external reality.
A few modern thinkers have understood this. These are people like the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, who wanted to bypass abstract theorizing and begin their philosophical system with their lived experience, for we are not detached minds looking at the world; we are embedded in it. Another notable thinker is Søren Kierkegaard, who overcame Hegel’s synthetic system of all of history and said reality is known by living in it. G. E. Moore held up his hands and said, “Here is one hand, and here is another.”[1] His point was that common-sense understandings of reality need no philosophical justification.
These thinkers do not like beginning with thought and ideas because they have a deep intuition of claustrophobia. The head is very small and cramped and not a comfortable place to live in. They like doors and windows and breathe the fresh air of a universe “out there.” They fear more than anything a head without windows and conceive of it as a kind of prison. They have noted the insanity of many modern thinkers since Descartes who have gone mad in such small confines. They have been right about the mental tendencies of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and most other modern thinkers. They are all afflicted with Descartes’ conceit concerning the vaunted (and illusory) creative powers of their own thought. They never do get out of their own heads to a reality outside of themselves, so of course they all tend to solipsism and craziness.[2]
This minority of modern thinkers wants to begin not with thought (as did Descartes) but with what they term “an intuition of being.” That is the immediate intuition presented to the thinking and perceiving man of the existence of the world and of existing objects outside of him. They maintain, quite sensibly I might add, that modern thought that begins with “perception” and with “thought” make as an ideal a “critique of thought” before there is anything to be thought about. They maintain that in that case, the mind begins with itself, and ends with itself. They are involved in a kind of philosophic anorexia, in which the brain feeds off of itself. Or, to use another illustration, this kind of modern thought is the opposite of casting a stone into a still pond, and watching a series of ever-growing concentric circles ripple outward from where the stone was thrown. The circles instead go inward, each smaller than the last.
We saw this in Descartes, and Descartes begins what is typical of “mainstream” modern philosophic thought. This tendency continues and develops (ironically) as philosophy tries to move forward. There is an increasing desire for growing outward concentric circles to more adequately deal with real human experience, but instead every effort acts like a boa constrictor creating tighter and tighter circles of starvation of the human mind and senses. This is especially true in the German giant Immanuel Kant. He is concerned with “experience,” by which he means the exercise of our senses, as well as our minds, and of our sense of the beautiful, and in this he tries to go beyond Descartes, Hume, and Rousseau. But for Kant, all experience is a result of our own minds imposing order on the “buzzing, blooming, confusion,” and he never reaches the “outside.” He indeed maintains that this is impossible. An “unconditioned” experience cannot happen.
Against this, a number of able followers of Thomas Aquinas all have a powerful sense of the constrictedness and futility of “modernity.” They recognize that the root of this constrictedness is modern self-centeredness. Modern thought is almost all a species of philosophic narcissism. Thought cannot begin by examining itself; it has to begin by thinking. And in order to think, it has to have something to think about. Philosophy, they say, begins with intellect immediately apprehending being outside of itself. If intellect is not nourished by “being” and the apprehension of the essences of being, then it has nothing to do. All of Kant’s immense labors in Critique of Pure Reason are really epistemological introvertedness, and his book could perhaps be more justly titled An Inspection of Pure Introspection. Kant’s effort is like taking out one’s eyes to examine them. You can’t both look at a thing and think about looking at a thing at the same time. But Kant tries, and when he does he loses the reality of the thing at the very outset.
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous dictum concerning philosophy being like a fly inside of a bottle, buzzing about, trying to find a way out but unable to, is exactly apt to the situation. Wittgenstein’s near-lifelong madness and struggle against suicide was not for garden variety reasons (like a love affair gone bad or money problems) but because he felt so the real tendencies towards complete claustrophobia in modern thought.
I personally can remember always having the sense, all the way back to college philosophy, that Idealism does lead to solipsism. Idealism is never able to give a coherent account of how or why there is more than one mind or of how they all perceive in the same way. Identity or similarity is a category of the mind itself, and hence I have (from a Kantian perspective) no way of knowing that the existence of other minds is anything other than a form imposed on whatever is out there by me and me alone. Of course, Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason with the assumption that other minds will perceive it.
G. K. Chesterton, the great English journalist and one of the most sensible men of the twentieth century, offered his own critique of Kant and modern thought more generally. To paraphrase his own deliberations on modern thought: “Are we dealing with external reality at all, or only with gyrations of the Kantianized brain that seeks internal coherence without any real reference to external being?” Chesterton grasped the modern sickness of being unable to have a real world. He experienced several years of near-suicidal depression as a young adult caused by his sense of being a “fly in the bottle.” He was depressed because he despaired of ever escaping the enclosed and encapsulated self for the “real world” or “real things.” The gravity was too great and the escape velocity of Kantianism too slow. He eventually became a Thomist because he grasped that the self and the mind need “real things” to nourish real thought. In German “ideosophy” (as some of the Thomists call “modern” thought), we have nothing but selfist inversion. Chesterton was clear that for him the enemy was not materialism but solipsism, or selfism. If one begins with perception and then moves to the critique of perception, one never escapes to any thing to be thought about. Part of what helped him (after which he became the most cheerful of men) was his discovery of the Thomist doctrine of “the intuition of being.” The intuition of being is the innate and created knowledge of created being and, behind that, of the Creator himself. Chesterton was able to get outside of himself, and beyond that, even further. Chesterton discovered that there was an implication to the existence of the world, and like our previous section, it is an implication that is good beyond imagination. Eventually Chesterton found his way home. Chesterton became a believing Christian.
When we remove the blinders of modernity and rediscover the reality of the world, we actually can understand what Thomas was talking about in his five proofs for God’s existence, and they become freshly persuasive to us once again.
III.
Aquinas developed five proofs for the existence of God; they all reason from the “common sense” facts of the world to the reality of God: causality, motion, design, and morality. He takes note of our sense of the “contingency” of the world and everything in it. That means we sense the world is non-necessary, dependent, and incomplete.
But since the thirteenth century, the apologetic results of the proofs are ambiguous and even disappointing. Some say that Aquinas never generated his arguments in the first place to persuade unbelievers but wrote them to confirm the faithful in what they already knew. This is possible, but the proofs have frequently been used to persuade the unpersuaded and unpersuadable. Among unbelievers, the average man is loosely unconvinced, the philosopher is rigorously unconvinced, and only the Christian is confirmed in what he already knew. The believer is strongly tempted to false optimism, hoping he can get his unbelieving neighbor to see what he sees. It seems this rarely happens.
Two of the wisest Catholic apologists, one of them a passionate Thomist, have said as much, either by direct confession or by omission. Pascal (and a shrewder observer of men has never lived) says the proofs are virtually worthless for the purposes of convincing non-believers (Pensées 781) and may only make men to bend the knee in submission if they are intelligent enough to understand them and are then too proud after having done so. And Chesterson, who was very devoted to Thomas and many of his doctrines, never says a word about the proofs. Indeed, how exactly he could write a whole book on Thomas Aquinas (The Dumb Ox), admitted on all hands to be a masterpiece, and only in an indirect and circular way say anything about the proofs, is telling. And in Orthodoxy, in part his spiritual autobiography, it is clear that the proofs had nothing to do with his conversion at all.[3] Jacques Maritain, one of the most brilliant of modern Thomists, came to the proofs as a further witness to what he already believed.[4] He and his wife were drawn to faith by the life that they saw incarnated in various Christians that they were brought into contact with.
A person gets out of the proofs what he puts into them. If I am already a Christian, then nothing is more sensible than to see in the intricate design of the world, in the reality of moral conscience, and in the contingency of all things, the very direct hand of God. But if I am not a believer, these realities are hidden from me, and indeed in many cases, there is violent opposition to God as the conclusion of these arguments. They perhaps work for Christians because they support the truth of the Christian faith through external evidence other than what is baldly stated in the propositions themselves. And they perhaps don’t work for non-Christians, because they too bring other auxiliary assumptions to the table that are often unstated. Christians already know that the world is the creation of God. Non-Christians already know that whatever the world is, the explanation has to be something other than the God of the Bible. They know that in some way the facts of life simply are and somehow the world is self-contained. The proofs are a species of induction and induction can never lead to certain conclusions. At best, they lead to probable conclusions, and if it is only probable that God exists, then there is always also a chance that he doesn’t exist as well and that an alternative explanation is possible. If there is any wiggle room at all, it will be used to wiggle out of the reality of God’s existence. The truth is, for both Christians and non-Christians, the argument is not really inductive at all. It is deductive (it is actually presuppositional). The non-Christian knows ahead of time that the universe is all there is, and the Christian knows ahead of time that the world is the creation of God that gives testimony to his creating hand everywhere.
But what if we have somehow gotten something backwards? Thomas is a holy man, and holiness gives a person shrewdness of the sort that the common take on the proofs eludes him. Thomas is made out to be an intellectual who is out-of-touch with what might persuade ordinary people in an ordinary way. What if Thomas was in fact going at things differently than what we have been led to believe? What opens me to this possibility is Chesterton. How could he have written a masterpiece and hardly uttered a word about the proofs?. He is, if anyone is, a “natural Thomist.” He is a Thomist, and he understands Thomas quite intuitively. No one has more sympathy with Thomas than he. And it is clear that he saw and understood something that Thomists who belong to the inner clique have always gotten. And that is that Thomism is at heart about things in the most concrete kind of way. They have a kind of affection for things and for real being, for real stuff out there. It’s the kind of affection that some people reserve for their pets, but it should not be so limited. They love things, and they love the world and the universe as a place of many, many things that can all be looked at and inspire awe. Let me demonstrate my point by quoting the “natural Thomist” Maritain:[5]
A hidden but powerful teleological motivation also intervenes at this point, to which idealism unconsciously obeys, so cheating at its own game. Idealism’s concern is precisely that it not be led to a certain terminus; it aims to avoid a certain final conclusion. Now if, from the very start, things and the extramental stability whereby they regulate our thought are so carefully rejected, it is because of the fact, above all else, that owing to a secret instinct that is the more imperious in that it remains unconfessed, the mind does not want in the end to be forced to come face to face with a transcendent, supreme reality, an abyss of personality before which our thought has to adore. The bastions and fortresses of idealistic philosophy thus appear to be just so many vast defense works against divine personality. Nothing is more significant than those far-flung works. It is enough that things exist for God to be unavoidable. Let us but grant to a bit of moss or the smallest ant its due nature as an ontological reality, and we can no longer escape the terrifying hand that made us.
This is exactly the spirit of Thomas. This is Thomism of the heart. There is an argument in this that could be reduced to a syllogism. And although I am aware that Thomism formally and technically argues from natural reason to God’s existence, the following is the underlying, most basic, and first argument that Thomas and his greatest followers have always used.[6] It is simply this:
- The world and all of the facts and things of the world are creatures.
- All creatures are created by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
- Therefore, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob created the world and all of the facts and things of the world
It is reasoning from creatureliness to the Creator. It is the naïve reasoning of a Christian. It is a full circle. The reality of God is wholly contained in the preceding idea of creation. But if this is so, we are back to the very circle mentioned above, and don’t Thomists want to speak to people who are outside of their club? So how have we gotten anywhere? But patience. Let’s continue and see where this takes us. As Chesterton says:
Let’s turn for a moment to Thomas Aquinas himself. I want to pear things down and get right to the nub. St. Thomas lived a long time ago, and he was fat. These are the two most relevant facts for us to deal with in regard to him. In living a long time ago, this is valuable to us, because so often it turns out that a long time ago, people were troubled by many of the same things that we are now. This surprises us and even shocks us, but it is good for us to learn because it shocks us out of our conceit, and invites us into the company of suffering humanity. There is no more sure way to insulate yourself from cure for your troubles than to continually reassure yourself that “no one has ever suffered as I.” This conceited sense of uniqueness is deadly, and modern people are full of this poison. Then there is a second kind of conceit that is exactly the opposite but which stands as the inevitable companion to the first. And that is that all of the world has always been peopled by folks exactly like me. So a politicized upper middle class American, may be today completely sure that every tribesman, and every third world peasant, has always had and completely shared his own sensibilities, his own sense of justice and equality, and his own outrage at all of the same wrongs. He regards himself as being universal in outlook, when in fact he is completely ethnocentric. So, it also turns out that although surprising sufferings and analogies are shared with many other people of different places and different times, people have also been shockingly disanalogous to us. What we take for granted never so much as occurred to them.
And in regard to our second proposition, St. Thomas was fat, and since he was fat, he needed a very firm place in which to stand. God made him fat so he would have to find an adequate place to stand, an adequate place to be. In regard to this, he made a very stunning discovery. He discovered the world.[7] He was the Christopher Columbus of the world itself. The discovery was so amazing, and was so certain, that he set out with his new found knowledge to show its most certain implication: the very existence of God. Thomas was like the first man to wake up and discover that the sun shined. Nobody before him had ever noticed. Of course it had been shining all along, but somebody first noted the fact. It is remarkable to notice these things. Thomas didn’t demonstrate that the world existed, he discovered that it did, or perhaps one should say, it was revealed to him. In truth, the person of Thomas’ day did not doubt the world’s existence the way a modern idealist or nihilist does, he had never thought of it in the first place. This was a place where he was weak. As a result of his weakness, there was a place that the armor of Christendom had a chink, a big crack, and a dark nihilism that fed centrally off of the unreality of the world and posited a final monism that denied all, was a great danger as a hidden enemy to the developing new civilization that would be Europe. Is the world and all that is within it really real? The ancient world was never quite sure of the answer to this, just as the great civilizations of the East still are not. To believe that it is, is only a late triumph of Christianity. Indeed, it may be the central achievement of the medieval period. And when Christianity recedes, as in the late 19th and 20th centuries, then all the old ancient doubts come creeping back. But it is different the second time. It was one thing for men of long ago to be dim on the reality of things. It is another to apostasize after you have been given the light. One is a sin of ignorance, the other of presumption. The first is quite excusable, the second carries within it the treachery of Judas.
Up to this point, Christianity had not worked out the implications of creation. It had worked out the Trinity, it had worked out who the Person of Christ was. Augustine had thought very deeply about God’s sovereignty, and many other things. All of these things implied creation, but it was still in the background and the church had not yet, in a head on way, taken on creation. That is why monism could creep back and feed on this like a black hole that would swallow light. This was an area that in men’s minds was still dark and shadowy.
This is why Chesterton is Thomas’ twin.[8] He also was very fat and lived a long time ago, although not literally so. He died in 1936. But he tried very hard to apply the achievements of the Middle Ages to the modern world by helping us remember who they really were and what they really did as opposed to the mythologies of the “Dark Ages.” Thomas saw the reality of the world; Chesterton saw it too and tried to reapply it. In Thomas’ day, it had never been articulated, and in Chesterton’s a new nihilism wanted to kill it.
New discoveries are always accompanied by great certainty and by great joy. So much of what happens with new discoveries is that time is spent experimenting with the dimensions of the thing, its abilities and potentialities (this is what came to be known in the modern world as “science”). Joy and exuberance is the mark so often of receiving something that is new. For a period of time, you are simply thrilled, and it takes time to get used to it. One of the implications that came along with this newness of the world was the ease with which Thomas could prove God’s existence. This is why we are wrong in our modern apprehension of the proofs. To many of us, they are dim and unpersuasive. But it is because we stand in a different place from medieval man. To him, it was the most persuasive thing in the world because he had a world in which to stand to be persuaded from.[9] And beyond that, he saw more, much more than most moderns do. It is reflected in the brightness of the colors of medieval paintings and of the exploration of space and perspective in them that the artists began to observe. We have forgotten what he saw and how astonishing it was. Even by the age of Pascal, men were becoming jaded. They no longer appreciate, let alone stand in awe of, the great gift that came to us through the medievals. Pascal had to find another way to lead men to God. That way had grown dim. And it leads us to the real reason that Chesterton makes so little of the proofs. It is certainly not because he did not appreciate them. It is because he had re-apprehended the same truth as Thomas but saw that he must go at it backwards. Instead of nature being the most obvious proof of God’s existence, we must first remember that nature itself exists. Christians must deal with modern men in the way petulant children are dealt with. Do you really want to lose this world, the thing that you want to throw away and disclaim in your spoiledness? Have the true consequences really sunk into your soul? You will have to be shown what it is that you are about to do.
I recently lived through an earthquake. It was fairly mild as earthquakes go but still an experience. To awaken to huge buildings being shaken like children’s blocks and having the ground under you turn to rolling jelly is most unnerving. It makes all of those old Bible passages come alive about the earth passing away and the sky being rolled up like a scroll. To really have the world disappear would be the sum total of all that is terrifying. This is what modern man is toying with, and he needs to be shown.
But if we live in a time of apostasy from the once widely-held truth of God’s existence, we must deal with it differently than it was dealt with in the first place. Giving premarital counseling to a young engaged couple is different from giving marriage counseling to a relationship near divorce which spent many years in making and unmaking. Dealing with apostates is different than dealing with children who never heard the truth. So now we must stand Thomas on his head. What was suddenly so obvious and joyous to him after a lifelong “aha!” experience with discovering the creation is different now in dealing with old blasé debauches who have lost their capacity for awe and amazement.
It has only been of late that people have begun to notice the real effect if Aquinas didn’t succeed in his proofs. The real objections if he did not succeed are almost never objections to God’s existence. They are objections to the world’s existence. But this is hardly ever noticed, and the opponents crow too soon when they claim that they have shown that God has not been proved. If he has not been proven then it is because men have forgotten what the world really is and what an amazing thing it is. What has not been proven (but was so immediately luminous to Aquinas) is that causality is constant and utterly reliable.[10] And what has not been proven is that there is no such thing as an infinite string of finite causes which go back and back, forever and ever.[11] Thomas did not have to prove it because this would mean that there is no final explanation and therefore no ground for any explanations. What has not been proven is that the world is not its own explanation in toto. And what has not been proven is that there is everywhere a design in the world, which would make it possible for arguments to be about something (for arguments cannot demonstrate perfect chaos). The defects are all found in the world, not in God. Aquinas had not yet achieved perfect indifference, that degree of modern sophistication that glories in the absurd. Like a child, he was quite sure of the reality of reliable and constant causality, of the reality of design everywhere, of the impossibility of pure contingency or of death-like rationalism that made everything to be a final block of ice. His naïvety abounded to such an extent that he imagined that reason was for something, and that when he thought about something, the coherence and correspondence that seemed to be the consequence was not an accident or a mistake. He actually gloried in these things.
Now if in fact the world does exist, then the proofs are meant to tell us all about it. They tell us what the conclusion of the world is, which is God, the God of the Bible. If one was still not quite sure, still not quite convinced, then he could grant the world for arguments sake. And then, further certitude becomes part of the function of the conclusion of the argument. God is certainly the conclusion, but he is also the guarantor of the premises. It works both ways. If there is a God, there is also a world, just as if there is a world, there is then a God. This does not imply the necessity of this world or the necessity of creation. The world is not a corollary to God and does nothing to complete him. He simply guarantees the existence and rationality of the world in which we do actually live.
But if the Catherists were right then, or the modern nihilists are right now, and there is no guarantee of a world in which reason and sensibility can exist, then the very people who castigate the proofs ought to be brave enough to admit that they are no longer sure of any such thing as reason or existence or even of proofs, but they hardly ever do. They will tell you that Aquinas has failed, but they will fail to tell you that if Aquinas is not right, there is not enough of a world left to even disagree with him. If the final statement of the universe is that “it just is” and that it is contained in itself, then there is nothing to say because you have to be able to put some predicates to the subject, and you no longer have any assurance of being able to do this at all. To disagree with him, you would have to have a stable world of constant and predictable causality and of discernible design and of a place in which some point can be made because all things have a final point. Thomas gave you a world in the first place so other disagreements were possible. But side with his enemies, and the dark night of real randomness, and sheer non-existence will overcome you. You have shot your weapon of reason and argument and dialectic right out from your own hand.
I had a professor in college who was a lapsed Catholic. One day he commented in an off-handed way about something Chesterton had written. He said something to the effect that it was a very insightful thing to say, but of course it “came from that narrow Catholic framework.” I thought to myself then, and I think even more so now, “Narrow, compared to what? Your own modern analytical framework that analyses and parses words and is all stuck somewhere inside your own head?” I am not a Catholic, but I share with orthodox Catholics all of the grandness and greatness and hugeness of angels and archangels and the infinite Triune God who has created heaven and earth, and we speak of plans that originated from before the foundation of the world which roll on and on to the consummation of all things. My professor was confusing these great realities with the narrowness of the Irish Catholic parish of his childhood, no doubt peopled by relatively ignorant, untraveled priests. But they, even in their uneducated narrowness, had in their Catholic faith a window on such vastness as my professor in his then-current spiritual state had even lost the capacity to imagine, let alone hope for. It was comic to imagine that what occupied his bald Irish head had much space about it at all.
Aquinas himself gave the most interesting definition of sloth that I have ever seen anywhere, indeed that I can even imagine. He said that sloth was the refusal of joy.[12] Let me suggest that people reject Aquinas’s discovery and argument because they are intellectually and spiritually slothful. In his day, it would have meant the refusal of the discovery of the creation. And in ours? It means the same thing. It is simply too much effort, it is too hard, to begin to imagine, and to receive, and to work through, the idea that it might be true. But if you did, truth could be saved, and so could the world, and nature. And that would be joy. It is a lot to sacrifice for a little ease.
[1] G. E. Moore, Philosophical Papers (Collier Books, 1962), 144.
[2] Jacques Maritain, Distinguish or Unite or Degrees of Knowledge (Scribner, 1959), 1–4.
[3] This continues to amaze me, and I never see anyone comment on it. It seems to have been irrelevant to Chesterton. What was relevant to him was at heart, Thomas’ “intuition of being” which begins with the reality of creation. It enabled him to escape his own sense of cursed autonomy of de facto solipsism. Chesterton begins with creation and ends with the God of the Bible. In his greatest writings (on Thomas and Francis, Orthodoxy, Everlasting Man, The Ball and the Cross, and The Man Who Was Thursday), Chesterton was essentially a presuppositionalist mixed with literary genius. In Orthodoxy, his most extended and complete apologetic, his argument is all reductio ad absurdum: to not believe in God reduces a man to absurdity, and only orthodoxy can give a person the necessary preconditions to know or to act. He hated modern egoism, pluralism (“the world nearly died of broad mindedness once before”), and new age pantheism (“the ball is the symbol of all pantheisms, ancient and modern—the Cross brings the crisis of the Living God”). The Man Who Was Thursday is the greatest novel of the twentieth century. It premises that all Christians are secret agents who are blowing up the modern world and at the same time secret agents who are establishing the new rule and order of God.
[4] Raïssa Maritain, We Have Been Friends Together: Memoirs, trans. Julie Kernan (Longmans, Green and Co., 1942).
[5] Jacques Maritain, Distinguish or Unite or Degrees of Knowledge (Scribner, 1959), 109–110. Modern phenomenology and existentialism, and even Thomism, are often very acute in their analysis of this or that “mode” of being. It can analyze the most fascinating nuances of existence and comportments toward this or that end. But there is one mode of being that is almost never acknowledged or analyzed: the mode of being that is created. If this is not the beginning point in our “intuition of being,” then we shall forever go in endless gyrations to nowhere. Paul very clearly understood the “mode of createdness” as the proper beginning place: “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Rom 1:20 RSV). The New English Bible is especially luminous here: “For all that may be known of God by men lies plain before their eyes; indeed God himself has disclosed it to them. His invisible attributes, that is to say his everlasting power and deity, have been visible, ever since the world began, to the eye of reason, in the things he has made” (1:19–20 NEB). The “luminosity” of being is precisely in its own unveiling of itself, its own manifestation of itself as a reveals God as both maker and upholder.
[6] Thomism, in spite of the fact that it has produced wonderful and liberating scholarship into this century, has an ambiguity right in the heart of it. Thomism is double-minded. On the one hand, it wants to begin perception and thought with mere being instead of from created being. But on the other hand, it has not been true to itself because nobody has a deeper real attachment to the world as creation than Thomists. Nobody loves the world in a holy and sanctified way more than they. So when they start from a “neutral” starting point and then want to be able to find their way to God, they are doing a questionable thing. To quote Van Til, Thomas and his disciples want to use a “blockhouse methodology.” That is, they want to build the first story of the building on the basis of natural reason and proceed from there to reason their way to revelation.. However, it is clear that the great Thomists equivocate here. I doubt that Thomas ever regarded things as just things, purely to be apprehended by the naked intellect, any more than he would regard his mother as just some woman to be addressed in the third person. More than any other philosophers, the Thomists regard the world with exceeding great love and affection. They regard her as a creature. This is true of Thomas as much as it is St. Francis.
[7] What convinced me years ago that Chesterton was a genius and not just a man of ability was his chapter in The Dumb Ox comparing Francis and Thomas and showing that they were both doing exactly the same thing in spite of the black-and-white differences in temperament, calling, and gifts. Both were called by God to awaken the world to the being of the world. Francis’ poem “Brother Sun, Sister Moon” is very much the real spirit of Thomas as well.
[8] Chesterton was far ahead of the then-burgeoning “Thomistic revival” of the nineteenth century which emphasized rationalistic foundationalism. Or maybe he anticipated much of post-modernity by having so thoroughly and intuitively grasped Thomas’ pre-modernity and the deeper truth. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and biography of Thomas, The Dumb Ox, are not “Thomistic” at all but are largely presuppositional volumes.
[9] See C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1964).
[10] But see Aristotle, Physics 2.3, 194b16–195a3; Posterior Analytics 2.11, 94a20–b8; cf. Physics 2.8, 196b10–15; 198b34–36; 199a8–b32: “What happens always or for the most part cannot be due to chance” (198b34).
[11] But see Aristotle, Metaphysics 2.2, 994a1–19: “It is impossible that there should be demonstration if there is an infinite regress…nor can causes go on to infinity in the same way.”
[12] Joseph Peiper, Leisure the Basis of Culture, trans. Alexander Dru (Ignatius Press, 2009), 43–46.