SOURCE: "Introduction: Being with Order" in Perfection of the Universe according to Aquinas: A Teleological Cosmology, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992, pp. 1-31.

[In the following excerpt, Blanchette explains Aquinas's philosophy of being, as well as what he meant by the perfection of the universe.]

The idea of the universe and its perfection is not one we think of readily. Moreover, if we do think of the universe as a whole, we are not inclined to think of it as perfect. Our idea of perfection is no less vague and vacillating than our idea of the universe. Physicists think of the universe as a whole in their cosmology, but only in terms of their abstract mathematical formulas. They do not think of it in its concrete perfection as including life and thought. Philosophers pay more attention to life and thought as part of what goes on in the real world, but they are less apt today to think of these as perfections, much less as perfection of the universe. If there is any thought given to teleology, it is not usually associated with cosmology.

Thus the thought of the perfection of the universe perplexes us. Is it an inference that the world is "the best possible" in some closed fashion, as Leibniz and perhaps Plato thought about it, or is it a suggestion that the world is in process toward some kind of completion? Is it something that physics alone can deal with, or is it something that requires some philosophical thought, if not some theology as well?

I shall explore this perplexity by examining the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who was at once a theologian, a philosopher, and even a physicist of sorts, inasmuch as he accepted the ancient cosmology and often thought in its terms to elucidate questions in theology and philosophy.

For Aquinas the idea of the perfection of the universe was first associated with the physical makeup of the universe, with its fundamental laws of motion and its essential constituent parts. It was thus first a physical idea, so to speak. But it did not remain only that. It became also a metaphysical idea relevant to the understanding of all the different parts of the universe, spiritual as well as physical, and to the understanding of being itself in its different degrees. In other words, it became an integral part of his metaphysics or his philosophy of being, from which it was assumed into his theology.

It is from this integration of the idea of the universe and its perfection into Saint Thomas's better known metaphysics of being that we begin our exploration.

Philosophy of Being and the Universe

Saint Thomas Aquinas's philosophy of being has received considerable attention in recent times. Etienne Gilson, for example, focused on it at the beginning of his presentation of Le thomisme, at least starting from the fourth edition in 1942, and since then has made much of it in his own more systematic works, Being and Some Philosophers and The Elements of Christian Philosophy.¹ For him "the notion of the act of being (esse) … is the very core of the Thomistic interpretation of reality."² Joseph de Finance has contributed an important study, Étre et agir dans la philosophie de saint Thomas,³ which has not received sufficient attention among English-speaking interpreters of Saint Thomas. Louis Geiger has studied the participation of this act of being⁴ and André Hayen has studied its communication.⁵ Again, Cornelio Fabro has refocused on the Thomist esse, pulling many of these classical themes of participation and causality together in a new synthesis and maintaining that the Thomist metaphysics of esse as original and originating act offers the best solution to the kind of impasse into which modern thought, down to Hegel and Heidegger, seems to have fallen as a result of having given priority to essence over esse, or thought over being.⁶

All of these studies give attention to the philosophy of the universe, as it plays such a prominent part in the thought of Saint Thomas. Gilson devotes one brief chapter to it in his account of Saint Thomas's philosophy (The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, chap. VI, 130-43). The importance of the theme is brought out more strongly by de Finance, who insists not only on the participation in being but also on the conversion of being toward its source through its own dynamism and the various degrees of activity that constitute an ascension of the entire universe (Étre et agir, chaps. V-IX, 160-355). Geiger distinguishes between two systems of participation, one by composition and one by participation, each of which includes a system of the world. In his presentation of Saint Thomas's synthesis of these two systems, Geiger focuses on the system of the world anew as well as on being (La participation, chap. XIV), thus indicating the complementarity of these two themes through the notion of participation, a complementarity that will be made clear also through the notion of perfection. Hayen, by focusing on the "communication of being," brings us closer to where the philosophy of being and the philosophy of the universe join: esse would seem to be something "common" in being communicated to a diversity of beings, but Hayen tends to view the hierarchy that this implies for the system of the world more as a remnant of Greek thought than as something integral to Saint Thomas's own approach to being (La communication, vol. II, part 2, chap. 2). Finally, Fabro speaks of a twofold order of causality, one predicamental, which is according to becoming or movement in the universe, and one transcendental, which is according to being or esse, the proper term of the act of creation itself (Participation et causalité, part 2, sects. II and III).Fabro's concern, however, is more with working out the relation between creatures and the creator through the act of being than with the order of creation as such. Thus, in all of these studies, and in others as well⁷ the idea of the universe is an integral part of what is at issue, along with the idea of being, but it is not elaborated upon as a theme in its own right, so to speak, as I intend to do here. By "universe" here is meant the totality of things created, the universitas creaturarum, which, according to Aquinas, is to be distinguished from the Creator.

To appreciate how Saint Thomas's philosophy of the universe relates to his philosophy of being, it is enough to reflect on how they come together in relation to the act of creation as such, which, as we shall see, is the only properly universal kind of causation. To speak of the First Cause is to speak at the same time of the Universal Cause, Saint Thomas's preferred way of referring to God in terms of causation, as the First Cause is the cause of everything as well as of the whole of being. He speaks of creation, for example, as an "emanation of the whole of being from the universal cause" (S.T., I, q. 45, a. 1, c). But this is also to suggest that the Universal Cause is the cause of the universe as such. In distinguishing creation from the way of becoming by which something comes to be, Aquinas writes of "another origin of things according to which to be is given out to the whole university of things (esse attribuitur toti universitati rerum) by the first being (ente) which is its own to be (esse)" (De Subst. Sep., c. 9, n. 48). Thus, to insist on esse as the proper term of creation, as Fabro rightly does with reference to the Thomist idea of transcendental causation, is not to cut esse off from the universitas rerum, as if it were some partial abstraction, but to see it concretely as ordered in a diversity and a multiplicity of beings. "Divine wisdom," Aquinas writes at another point, "is the effective cause of all things, insofar as it produces them in esse and it not only gives being to things, but also being with order in things—esse cum ordine in rebus" (In De Div. Nom., c. 7, lec. 4, n. 733). At another point he speaks of the flow from the first principle as that "from which is perfected the total being of all things—a quo perficitur totum esse omnium rerum" (In I De Caelo, lec. 6, n. 64[7]). This suggests how closely his philosophy of being is related to a philosophy of the universe.

In one sense, the Thomist esse is what is highest in creatures, which is why only the First Cause can be its effective cause. Esse is the perfection of perfections in every created being. But it is also what is most common among all created things, not as some abstract lowest common denominator, but as that which is shared in a wide diversity of degrees. In another sense, however, as Saint Thomas also suggests at times, the perfection of the universe is the highest good in creation, which, as in the case of esse, gives it a special relation to the creative act as such. "The best in all caused beings is the order of the universe, in which the good of the universe consists.… Hence it is necessary to bring the order of the universe back to God as to its proper cause" (C.G., I, c. 42, n. 1183). In other words, "the distinction of the parts of the universe and their order is the proper effect of the first cause" (ibid., n. 1186), much as esse is in creatures, which are by participation as distinct from the Esse subsistens. The Thomist idea of esse and the Thomist idea of the universe thus tend to come together in the metaphysics of creation as well as in the notion of perfection and they flow together in the single idea of an esse cum ordine in rebus or a totum esse omnium rerum.

The Universe and Perfection

Perfection is a theme in the thought of Saint Thomas that Pervades not only his philosophy of being and his philosophy of the universe but also almost every other subject he ever discussed, whether incosmology, anthropology, or theology. In many respects it ties all of these realms together. Like his idea of the universe, with which it is closely related, as we shall show, perfection is an idea that has received little systematic attention in Thomistic studies, even though it has been widely used by both interpreters and Saint Thomas alike, as can readily be seen by a simple consultation of the Index Thomisticus⁸ where references to "perfection" in its different forms as noun, verb, adjective, or adverb cover literally hundreds of columns.

"Perfection" is a notion we have gotten out of the habit of using, except perhaps for Whiteheadian process philosophers; for Saint Thomas, however, who still knew how to think in terms of teleology, it was a basic category, or, better still, a complex of categories or ideas he used constantly to articulate his understanding of reality. Perhaps more than anything else, it is the key to understanding his philosophy of the universe: as we shall have occasion to see, the totality that characterizes what is meant by "universe" is in many respects another term for "perfection," a sort of "perfection of perfections" on the level of creation as a whole or the totum esse omnium rerum.

Saint Thomas's theory of the universe has been the object of two studies worth mentioning here, one in philosophy and one in theology. In his work, L 'univers et 1'homme dans la philosophie de saint Thomas,⁹ Joseph Legrand has gathered together and organized most of the significant philosophical material concerning Saint Thomas on the universe and the human being's place in it, quite rightly centering his attention on human being, as we shall see for ourselves. In The Order of the Universe in the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, ¹⁰ John H. Wright goes over much of the same material, but more synthetically and with a greater focus on the theological dimension of the question; that is, the relation of the universe to God, plus an indication of the many ways in which Saint Thomas's doctrine on the order of the universe was operative in his theology.

Both of these authors have performed a valuable service in bringing Saint Thomas's idea of the universe to the fore and in pulling together the materials that pertain to this idea. But neither of them has sufficiently insisted on the notion of perfection that Saint Thomas associates with the universe as a whole. In their work the notion recurs frequently, and inevitably, given Saint Thomas's consistent coupling of the two ideas, universe and perfection, but the idea of perfection and the importance it has for a proper understanding of the universe are never examined as they should be, considering that perfection is the synthesizing element in Saint Thomas's conception of the universe. Perfection, for example, governs the idea of degrees of being, the idea of diversity and multiplicity, and the idea of order itself, that which makes the universe truly a uni-verse, the universitas rerum. It is not just any idea of the universe that is of interest to, and in, Aquinas; it is the idea that the universe is already constituted with a certain degree of perfection as it moves toward its greater perfection. This is the idea that, in theology, influenced his conception of divine providence and predestination or of how fitting it was that the Word of God should become man, for the good of the universe as well as of man. In philosophy, this idea was the key to the need for diversity and multiplicity in the emanation of creatures from God, to the question of secondary causes operating in the universe under the First Cause, and to the understanding of the different degrees of being as well as action presupposed by him even in his ways to prove the existence of God. For this reason, if for no other, Saint Thomas's idea of the perfection of the universe deserves further attention.

But there is another reason why Saint Thomas's idea might be deserving of attention. If contemporary Thomists have shown little interest in this idea of the perfection of the universe, others have by no means ignored it. Lovejoy has traced the development of the idea all the way from Plato down to the nineteenth century, passing through medieval thought and Saint Thomas along the way, in his study The Great Chain of Being.¹¹ But his treatment of the idea in Saint Thomas remained quite inadequate and even erroneous in certain serious respects, a reproach that could perhaps be made with respect to his treatment of other authors as well, especially Leibniz, who also had a principle of perfection. Lovejoy preferred to speak of a principle of plenitude rather than of perfection,¹² and in this he may have been unduly influenced by Spinoza, who reduced "perfection" to "reality" and dismissed the teleological idea of perfection as merely a matter of prejudice on the part of human beings and as irrelevant to any rational conception of reality (The Ethics, part IV, Preface). The consequence was that Lovejoy seems to have been unable to appreciate the logic of perfection as found in Saint Thomas, or in Leibniz, and to have been able to understand only a more deterministic kind of emanation which reduces his so-called principle of plenitude to a principle of sufficient reason.¹³ Thus, a more careful study of Saint Thomas's understanding of what could be called his "principle of perfection" could help to correct at least some of this Spinozistic bias in the understanding of the "chain of being," a metaphor that may have been popular in the eighteenth century but that hardly occurred in earlier, less mechanistic times.

In another study, The Idea of Perfection in the Western World,¹⁴ Martin Foss also tends to reduce the idea of perfection to an ideal of organized utility akin to Cartesian mechanism or the kind of clear and distinct mathematical thinking that has come to characterize modern scientific systems and to dismiss the idea of divine perfection as empty and meaningless This is the idea of perfection seen as applicable only to the world of process, but further reduced to what John Passmore has called "technical perfection,"¹⁵ the kind of perfection that pertains to skills in performing tasks. "This is a pleasantly rapid way of rejecting [not only] the perfectibility of man," Passmore remarks, an idea that he sets out to trace in the course of Western thought, but also many aspects of the perfectibility of the universe itself. While there is some point in distinguishing between divine perfection and perfection as found in creation, we shall see that the two are not mutually exclusive. But this will depend upon our seeing that perfection, even on the level of creatures, includes much more than a narrow deterministic concept allows for. This is something that Saint Thomas will be able to show us, starting from a teleological conception of nature, as Aristotle did.

The idea of perfection in Saint Thomas has been studied systematically, though only in part, as the groundwork for a study of the perfection of human being and its ontological foundations.¹⁶ It is interesting to note how much of the idea of both the universe and esse has to be used in this work to bring out the idea of perfection as it relates to human being. Conversely, for our part, while articulating what Saint Thomas understood by the perfection of the universe, we shall have to focus on human being as the key and the center of that perfection. His theory of the universe was at once a cosmology that centered on man and an anthropology that embraced cosmology.

Idea and Representation of the Universe

Part of the reason why Thomists have neglected Saint Thomas's philosophy of the universe and its perfection may be that it was too closely tied to his representation of the physical world, which was more or less taken for granted in his day but which has long since been discarded by modern science. In his presentation of Thomism, Gilson passes very quickly over this geocentric cosmology in which a systematic distinction was made between incorruptible heavenly bodies and the corruptible bodies here below, alleging that Saint Thomas was adding nothing to Aristotle and showed little interest in the subject. (The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, 174). In his other writings Gilson shows a marked resistance to having his metaphysics or that of Saint Thomas linked to any scientific theory or model.¹⁷ "We are interpreting history in a misleading way," he writes, "if we say that scholasticism tied the Christian faith to the ancient philosophy of Aristotle, and, consequently, that we are invited by its example to do the same thing with the philosophy of our age. What scholastic theology did was rather to create, in the human meaning of this word, a new metaphysics, whose truth, being independent of the state of science at any given historical moment, remains as permanent as the light of faith within which it was born" (Gilson Reader, 164). Part of the reason for this kind of separation between metaphysics and any kind of physics, whether ancient or modern, was to insist on the originality of the medieval theologian. But it does have the disadvantage of conveying the impression that Thomistic philosophy of being is more a matter of faith than of rational discourse, something which Saint Thomas himself would surely have disagreed with, as he clearly distinguished between two ways of teaching, one in doctrina philosophiae and the other in doctrina fidei, one being a way of investigation going from creatures to their creator and the other starting from God and embracing creatures as they are in relation to God.¹⁸ In fact, this whole tendency to separate metaphysics from the world of experience, as if it were a matter of "revelation" from Saint Thomas, if not from God, is unfaithful, if one may still use the term in a matter of philosophical discipleship, to the true philosophical method of Saint Thomas, as I shall argue in explaining my own method of presenting his idea of the universe in its perfection.

To be sure, the issue is not to subordinate metaphysics to the more properly experiential sciences. This has never been the case for anyone who understood metaphysics properly, especially not Aristotle, who still saw a closer link between metaphysics and physics than Plato did. This is part of the reason why Aquinas chose to follow Aristotle in philosophy rather than Plato and found in the Stagirite's philosophy an even better way of making the teaching of faith more manifest. "The universe before which the Christian finds himself," as Aime Forest has said referring to Saint Thomas, "is already the universe of Aristotle. Saint Thomas goes to the point of pulling the two inspirations [Christian and Aristotelian] together in a formula that deserves to be kept in mind, and wherein is expressed forcefully his philosophical decision, his confidence in the agreement between philosophical truth, which his reflection will bring out, and religious truth, which is handed down to him, 'according to the teaching of faith and of Aristotle'—secundum fidei doctrinam et Aristotelis."¹⁹

This is not to say that the Faith or even the metaphysics is tied to every detail of the Aristotelian representation of the cosmos. We shall see Saint Thomas distance himself from that model in many important respects. But we shall see him espouse it in many different ways, even to discuss such recondite theological questions as the state of the universe after the final resurrection at the end of time. The relation between physics and metaphysics was an open one for Saint Thomas, as it had been for Aristotle before him, but it was a relation he exploited constantly in his theology as well as his philosophy, and the idea of perfection was at the center of that exploitation.

Thus, to make little of Saint Thomas's understanding of physical cosmology is not only to ignore significant elements of his thought (historically speaking, since Aquinas himself was constantlyreferring to that understanding to illustrate his thinking on the order of being, on the virtues, and in theology). It is also to lose sight of some important metaphysical ideas, such as certain aspects of hylomorphic theory or the series of essentially subordinate causes in the universe, which Aquinas often explained and clarified in terms of that understanding, as Thomas Litt has pointed out.²⁰ These are points we shall have to consider at some length later on. For now, however, it is enough to recognize that, notwithstanding the obsolescence of the model, there were still important ideas connected with it, not the least of which was the perfection of the universe.

Having noted this close connection between the representation and the idea of the universe in Saint Thomas, nonetheless, we acknowledge a certain priority of the idea over the representation. This is clear even from the way Saint Thomas begins his commentary on De Caelo, where the basic cosmology is to be laid out in a systematic exposition: there he clearly distinguishes between the perfection of the universe and the parts of which it is made up and states that the first is to be shown before the second. "First [the author or the Philosopher] shows the perfection of the universe; secondly he shows of what parts it is made up—ex quibus partibus integratur" (In I De Caelo, lec. 2, n. 8[I]). And later on "after the Philosopher has shown that the universe is perfect… he shows of what parts its perfection is made up" (ibid., lec. 3, n. 19[l]). We see here an immediate connection between the universe and perfection that Saint Thomas will make his own, one that sets it above the parts that make it up, or the model in which this idea is to be represented. Later on, when the time comes to make some adjustments between the idea and the model, as we have already noted Saint Thomas will do, it is not the idea that will have to be adjusted to the model, but the model that will have to be adjusted to the idea.

In fact, an objection can be raised about the model from the very beginning: if the number three implies perfection, as the Philosopher initially argues with regard to the dimensions of a body, why are there four elements? If three is the perfect number "wouldn't it follow by the same reason that there would be only three elements, or three fingers of the hand" (In I De Caelo, lec. 2, n. 14[7]). The answer to this objection is not given immediately, because it belongs later on in this treatise and in the treatise De Generatione et Corruptione, which is to follow, when the model itself is more at issue, but the objection itself illustrates how the idea of perfection is to be used with reference to the universe. If there are four elements, that would seem to pertain to the perfection of the universe in the same way as five fingers seem to pertain to the perfection of the hand. But, then, how can the Philosopher start by arguing that three is the "perfect" and, therefore, the sufficient number of dimensions to constitute a body in existence?

We shall return to this surprising way, for an Aristotelian at least, of arguing about "body" and "perfection" in chapter 2, where we shall see that the argument goes from the totality of one body to the totality of all bodies. But for the moment what is important for us to note is that the idea of the universe and its perfection has a certain priority, if not independence, with respect to the model in which it finds its representation. The objection starts from an idea of perfection that is seen as applying to different numbers in different contexts. Why three in this case when four or five seem to be the perfect number in other cases? The answer to the objection will focus on the idea of perfection. The point for us here is to see that what governs the discussion is this idea of perfection and not the numbers, whether of three dimensions which constitute the totality of a body, four elements which constitute the totality of parts out of which things come to be or cease to be, or five fingers whichmake the hand the perfect instrument for reason. Along with the idea of the universe, we must also think of perfection and how it functions in the very constitution of reality; for Aquinas to be or esse is itself a perfection that even the empirical scientist recognizes when he insists on theories or suppositions that not only "save the appearances" but can also be verified through predictions that agree with observation.

Moreover, Saint Thomas himself was not past expressing his own reserve, following Aristotle, on the truth of the model he was assuming from others. "The suppositions which those people have discovered," he writes, "are not necessarily true: for although, when suppositions are made, the appearances may be saved, it still does not behoove us to say that these suppositions are true; because perhaps the appearances with regard to stars are saved in another way that is not yet grasped by men" (In II De Caelo, lec. 17, n. 451 [22]). Earlier he had distinguished between demonstration and supposition, saying that some part of the theory "was not demonstrated but a kind of supposition—non est demonstratum, sed suppositio quaedam" (In I De Caelo, lec. 3, n. 28). Saint Thomas had exacting demands for what he meant by scientific truth, and he did not find them met in the cosmological model he was using.

A similar reserve is evident even with regard to the key question of the incorruptibility of the heavens in that cosmology, as is clear from In I De Caelo, lec. 7, n. 76(6). If Saint Thomas did not express the same kind of reserve concerning other aspects of the model of the universe he took for granted, especially the theory of the four elements, it is because he had no reason for doing so. He surely was not an innovator in what we now call scientific theory. He did, however, underwrite Aristotle's willingness to rely on the better qualified and the more competent than himself to pass judgment on such things. "We must allow ourselves 'to be persuaded by the more certain,' that is, follow the opinion of those who have arrived at truth with greater certainty" (In XII Metaph., lec. 9, n. 2566), because, as it is said later on, the Philosopher himself "leaves what is necessary in this regard to those who are stronger and more powerful in discovering this [scientific truth] (fortiores et potentiores ad hoc inveniendum) than he would be himself (ibid., lec. 10, n. 2586). If an anachronism be permitted, what better recommendation could be found for Galileo's telescope, or Hubble's use of the "red shift" to calculate the distances of the nebulae, or even the newest radio telescopes? It is unfortunate that the Aristotelians of the seventeenth century had lost sight of this reserve with regard to scientific models expressed by their teacher. Saint Thomas had not, nor was his metaphysics of the universe so dependent on the scientific model he used that it lost all its validity with the obsolescence of the model. It is not the model that shaped the metaphysics, but the metaphysics that shaped the model, even though the latter was based on what has now come to be recognized as insufficient evidence or observation.

One thing that could be said about the Aristotelian model of cosmology is that it was well unified. This is why perhaps the idea of perfection could so easily be associated with it. Modern physics has shown that the model was much too simple to hold. In doing so, however, modern physics has diverged into different partial theories such as relativity and quantum mechanics, which cannot so easily be unified into a single theory or model for the cosmos as a whole. The metaphysical idea of perfection may have been submerged in this diversion, but who is to say that it is not reemerging in contemporary efforts to unify physics once again into one single model of space-time with an anthropic principle, weak or strong, and with a big bang or an inflationary expansion theory ofcreation? We cannot answer this question here, but I suggest that an examination of how the association of the idea of perfection with a particular model of the universe was once made could shed some light on how the question could be dealt even in modern physics.

We can begin this examination by looking at some analogies for thinking of the universe itself as a whole that Aquinas made ample use of and that can serve as a guideline for our elaborating upon his idea of the universe in its perfection.

Analogies for the Universe

The first analogy, that of a house, is relatively static, but it enables Aquinas to define certain conditions for things to constitute one universe together. First, they must all have something in common: "just as many stones come together with one another so that a house is constituted from them, similarly all the parts of the universe come together under the aspect of existing (in ratione existendi)" (In De Div. Nom., c. 4, lec. 6, n. 364). This first condition suggests that even existence is not a flat sort of lowest common denominator, but a structured coming together of many diverse beings. Second, inasmuch as the parts of the universe are diverse or different from one another, they must be adapted to one another in some order: "a house would not come to be from cement and stone, unless they were made apt for one another, and similarly the parts of the universe are made apt for one another, insofar as they can fall under one order" (ibid.). Order is thus the bond that holds diversity together. Third, one part must complement the other: "just as the wall and the roof are held up from the foundation and the roof covers the wall and the foundation, similarly in the universe the higher beings give perfection to the lower and the higher power (virtus) is made manifest in the lower" (ibid.). The analogy is beginning to crack at the seams, so to speak, but the point of complementarity within order is clear, without taking away anything from the difference or the distinction between things, absque praeiudicio distinctionis rerum. In fact, as we shall see over and over again, complementarity supposes difference. Fourth, there must be a certain proportion in all the parts, a certain arrangement among them from which will come their togetherness: "the parts being so disposed, therefore, their composition in a whole follows, inasmuch as from all the parts of the universe is constituted one totality of things (una rerum universitas)" (ibid.). Only with these four conditions, commonality, diversified order, complementarity, and proportionality, can we speak properly of a totality or a "university" of things.

But these conditions alone, elaborated upon according to the analogy with the house, are not enough to speak of the universe in the concrete. Saint Thomas goes on to point out that this totality of things, this order of the universe, can be viewed in either one of two ways, either in terms of things being contained in space, per modum continentiae localis, or in terms of things coming after one another in time, quantum ad temporalem successionem. This brings the dimensions of space and time into the conception of the universe, but even this is not enough yet to speak properly of the actual universe, since it still has to do only with conditions of possibility for the universe. Before Saint Thomas says it is enough, he has to bring in a further order, that of finality, which will lead us to the second analogy, that of the army, taken from Aristotle. "A twofold order is found in things. One is of the parts of some whole or of some multitude to one another, as the parts of a house are ordered to one another. The other is the order of things to an end. And this order is more fundamental (principalior) than the first. For, as the Philosopher says in XI Metaph., the order of the parts of anarmy to one another is in view of the order of the whole army to the general" (In I Eth, lec. 1, n. 1).

We see how Saint Thomas thinks of this second analogy in relation to the first. By itself, the analogy with the house cannot lead to an adequate understanding of the universe; it is too static and abstract, although it does illustrate the notion of order between diverse parts. The universe, however, is something more dynamic and concrete. To bring this out Saint Thomas turns to what seems to have been one of Aristotle's favorite analogies, since he uses it at two key points in his work, at the end of the Posterior Analytics,²¹ to illustrate how the intelligence takes hold in the flow of experience, and at the end of the Metaphysics,²² to illustrate how the universe relates to the Unmoved Mover as to its good. Unlike the beginning of the De Caelo, which we glimpsed a moment ago, where we are only at the beginning of the systematic reconstitution of the cosmos, this last illustration pertains to the universe as already constituted in its totality. Let us follow Saint Thomas's own careful reflection on the text of the Philosopher and see how he appropriates it. The text comes up after it has been shown how the First Mover is intelligent and intelligible, as Saint Thomas notes; as he also explains, the question arises because it has also been said that the First Mover moves as good and appetible. But Saint Thomas immediately proceeds to concretize this notion of the good in terms of finality and form.

For the good, inasmuch as it is the end of something, is twofold. For there is the end extrinsic to that which is for the end, as when we say that place is the end of that which is moved toward a place. There is also the end inside, as the form is the end of generation and alteration, and once the form is attained, it is a certain intrinsic good of that whose form it is. Now the form of any whole, which is one through a certain ordering of parts, is its order: hence it follows that it is its good. (In XII Metaph., lec. 12, n. 2627)

At this point we have to presuppose something about the order of place in the universe and the idea of form as the end of a coming-to-be (which we shall discuss later) but the thing to note is that order, in this dynamic conception of the universe, is now seen by Aquinas as analogous to the form in things that come to be, and it is in its order that the perfection of the universe, its form or its intrinsic good, will consist. The question, therefore, according to Saint Thomas, is whether the cosmos has a good such as this, or only a good separate from it. "The Philosopher is therefore asking whether the nature of the whole universe has a good and best, that is, a proper end, as though something separated from it, or whether it has a good and best in the order of its parts, in the way that the good of some natural thing is its form" (n. 2628).

The answer, as can be expected, is that it has both. The bonum separatum is the Prime Mover, who, in the preceding part of book XII, has already been shown to be the one from whom the whole of nature actually depends as from its and its good. The actuality of the bonum ordinis is simply inferred from the existence of that separated good on the basis of an understanding of final causality, which we shall see articulated in chapter 4. "Because all things whose end is one, have to come together in the order to the end, it is necessary that some order be found among the parts of the universe; and thus the universe has both a separated good, and a good of order" (n. 2629).

At this juncture the example of the army is brought in as an analogy for understanding the connectionbetween the good of order among the parts and the separated good: "as we see in an army: for the good of the army is both in the order itself of the army, and in the leader, who stands over the army" (n. 2630). Saint Thomas points out how the order of parts in a complex whole is subordinate to the end of the whole and how the end itself is a principle of order, so that the whole order of the universe is in view of the Prime Mover. He then adds something that perhaps goes beyond what Aristotle had in mind, attributing to the Unmoved Mover a will as well as an intellect: "so that, namely, there is explicated in the ordered universe that which is in the intellect and the will of the first mover" (n. 2631). But it is not this theological angle that interests us here. What concerns us more is the cosmological order itself, and it is to this that he next turns his attention: qualiter partes universi se habeant ad ordinem, how the parts of the universe stand in relation to order, which is toward an end.

Two things are evident at the outset and must be accounted for: all things are ordered somehow, but not all are ordered in the same way. Within order itself there is diversity, such as that which we see between the different animals and plants in nature. These are not without some relation to one another, "rather there is a certain affinity and order of one to the other. For plants are in view of animals, and animals are in view of human being. And that all are ordered to one another is evident from the fact that all are ordered to one end at the same time" (n. 2632). Human being stands at the pinnacle of nature, and from that vantage point it is the principle of order in nature, inasmuch as all inferior bodies are ordered to it; and it can, by its own initiative, introduce a new dimension of order. But the human being is still only a part of the universe, and as such it is itself ordered, along with the other parts (though in its own peculiar way, as we shall see), to the good of the universe as a whole.

Another example is then introduced to provide an analogy for understanding how things are differently ordered within one and the same order, or the relation between community and diversity-within-community; namely, the example of the well-governed household, which is not to be confused with the analogy of the house already presented. In the community of the household, apart from the father, who is seen as head and therefore as the principle of order, Saint Thomas goes on to explain, there are different grades: first, the sons, second, the servants, third, domestic animals, and so on. These various grades are related to the order of the household differently, in accordance with the wishes of the father. The sons are most intimately connected with it, so that nothing should come from them apart from this order. "For it is not appropriate that the sons do anything out of chance (casualiter) and without order; but everything, or most of what they do, is ordered" (n. 2633). The servants, on the other hand, and the domestic animals, do not participate so intimately in this order, qui est ad bonum commune, and so there is a great deal that can come from them that is quite contingent with regard to the familial order, and is casual in its regard, to use the expression of Saint Thomas. "And this is so because they have little affinity with the ruler of the household, who aims at the common good of the household" (ibid.).

Perhaps the most important element that the example of the household adds, over and above the example of the army, is this notion of affinity, an affinity that is not merely contingent upon the choice of the head, as in an army, but an affinity that would pertain to the nature of parts themselves and their relation to one another. This is especially significant when we see how it applies to the order of nature itself, for nature is like the father in a household. It is the principle found in the things of nature that brings each and every one of them to perform according to its role in the order of the universe. Just as the father directs the diverse members of the household, so also every being of natureis directed through its own proper nature, which inclines it to act according to the order of nature as a whole.

Clearly, this inclination in the proper nature of each thing cannot be viewed only in an order to the particular good of that particular thing, given the context of community in which it appears. The good of a thing, its proper good, must be viewed also on a more communal or universal scope, as is evident in the four levels of good that Saint Thomas spells out in another place.

The proper good of anything can be taken in many ways. One way is according to what is proper to it as an individual. And thus an animal seeks its good when it seeks food, with which to preserve itself in being. Another way is according to what belongs to it by reason of its species. And thus an animal seeks its proper good inasmuch as it seeks the generation and nurturing of offspring, or anything else it does for the conservation or the defense of individuals of its species. The third way is by reason of the genus. And thus the equivocal agent seeks its proper good in causing: as the sun does. The fourth way, however, is by reason of the similitude of analogy between things as principled (principiatorum) and their principle. And thus God, who is beyond genus, gives being to all things on account of his own good. (C.G., III, c. 24, n. 2052)

Hence the proper good of any particular thing follows the analogy of being and of the entire universe. The proper good of anything is not just its own particular good, but also the universal good, as it can be achieved by its activity, and in accordance with its place in the order of nature. Indeed, while activity is a seeking in many respects, it is also a quiescence, when some good has been attained, and a diffusion of good.

For a natural thing not only has a natural inclination with regard to its proper good, so as to acquire it when it does not have it, or to rest in it when it has it; but also to pour out its proper good on others, as much as possible. Hence we see that every agent, inasmuch as it is in act and perfect, does something similar to itself (facit sibi simile). (S.T., 1, q. 19, a. 2, c)

Of course, not all things are related to the universal end of nature in the same way. All of them still have one thing in common, namely, their own distinct identity with their own proper activity. But not all participate in the good of the whole equally by their activity. This is a second element of importance to be derived from the example of the household.

For there is something common to all things; because it is necessary that all arrive to the point of being discerned, that is, of having discrete and proper operations, and also of being discerned according to substance; and in this regard the order [of the universe] lacks nothing (in nullo deficit). But there are some things which not only have this, but further are such that they "communicate to the whole" all that is in them, that is, they are ordered to the common good of the whole. (In XII Metaph., lec. 12, n. 2635)

This is an elaboration on the comparison between the son and the servant in the household. The second kind of things mentioned in the text are those in which nothing happens apart from the order of nature or by chance. The things subject to chance, on the other hand, are those that depart from the order of nature at times, though they are not simply excluded from communication in theuniversal good as such, for it remains that every being of nature is ordered to the common good according to its natural action. Those that never depart from the natural order, those in whose action there is never any deficiency, do all that they do or have all that they have in communication with the whole—habent omnia sua communicantia ad totum. Those, on the other hand, that do depart from the natural order and are subject to chance, such as the corporeal beings about us, do not communicate in the whole so fully—non habent omnia sua communicantia ad totum.

It is clear that both Aristotle and Saint Thomas are thinking here in terms of their dichotomy between the incorruptible celestial bodies and the corruptible terrestrial bodies. In their view it is the heavenly bodies that are in total communication with the whole. But let us prescind from this dichotomy and look carefully at how Saint Thomas combines the two aspects of order and communication that hold a diversity of things together as one universe.

In sum, therefore, the solution is that order requires two things, namely, an ordination of distinct things and a communication (communicantiam) of the distinct things to the whole. With regard to the first, there is order in all things without fail (indeficienter); however, with regard to the second, there is an order without fail in some, which are the highest and nearest to the first principle, as are the separate substances and the heavenly bodies, in which nothing happens by chance and apart from nature: in some, however, it fails, as in bodies, in which something sometimes happens by chance apart from nature. And this is because of the distance from the first principle, which is always in the same way. (n. 2637)

What the analogy of the army brings out is that the perfection of the universe consists, not just in an order between diverse and complementary parts, as the analogy of the house brings out, but also a certain interaction between the parts where there is both an ordination of distinct parts (ordinationem distinctorum) and a communication in the whole (communicantiam ad totum) through affinity. Each part has its own proper activity, as in a well-ordered army, and together all parts, under the direction of the leader or First Mover, whose good they are ordered to (bonum separatum), constitute an internal order of their own, which is the intrinsic good of the universe or its form. Affinity to this good of the whole allows for different degrees of communicability of different parts with the whole, some being more closely identified with it than others, as was thought to be the case for separate substances and the heavenly bodies by reason of the immutability and necessity attributed to them. In the case of those parts where things could happen by chance or outside the order of nature (casualiter praeter naturam), that is, in the nature we experience here below, they did not happen simply outside of all order (extra omnem ordinem), but only outside the direct order of nature (extra ordinem rectum). For Aquinas, as for Aristotle, the order of nature was not deterministic and remained open to higher orders, as we shall see, including the order of free human agency, which is not mentioned here, perhaps because the analogy of an army does not lend itself very well to the idea of free agency, but which plays a central role, as we shall see, in Saint Thomas's conception of the ultimate perfection of the universe coming from the very interaction of its parts.

Implied in these two analogies is an idea of order that I shall have to articulate more carefully in my exposition of the idea of the universe, an order of activity toward an end and an order of communication within a whole. For Aquinas, as we shall see, any order is always understood in relation to some first principle which has to be unique, if the order is to be seen as one. But as anorder between different things, and not as the simple identity of one thing, it also has to be understood as some kind of diversity in different degrees of proximity to what is first or the principle in the order. It is from such an understanding of order that we have the idea of the uni-verse to begin with, with order understood as its form or internal perfection. Thus, to elaborate the idea of the universe in Aquinas will be to work out his idea of order as the perfection of the universe.

Philosophical Method in the Exposition of the Concept

Before I undertake this more detailed exposition, however, I shall say a few words on my method of doing so. It is well known that Saint Thomas wrote primarily, though not exclusively, as a theologian. It is also well known that, as already mentioned, he maintained a clear distinction between theological and philosophical method. The one started from God and included creatures as related to Him, whether as Creator or Redeemer, while the other started from creatures and ascended to God, after embracing the entire universe. What is not so well understood, however, is how these two orders or methods of procedure are related in the thinking of Saint Thomas and how, while remaining a theologian, he practiced a truly philosophical method as part of his discourse on divine questions. This, for him, was a matter, not just of philosophical necessity, but of theological exigency as well.

The best way to see this relation is perhaps the way he puts it in his brief discourse on method in question I of the Summa Theologiae, part I. After arguing that a divine teaching based on revelation is somehow necessary, that it can take the form of a science, and that this science is one while being both theoretical and practical at the same time, in article 5 he raises the question of how this science is related to the other sciences, whether, that is, it is higher (dignior) than these others. To answer the question, in the affirmative, he argues from the viewpoint both of speculative science, where Sacred Teaching is presented as both more certain and having to do with a higher subject matter, and of practical science, where Sacred Teaching is said to deal with the end that embraces all other ends. But it is his answer to the second objection that interests us here, where the relation of theology to philosophy is brought up.

In sum, the second objection states that Sacred Teaching cannot be higher than philosophy if it accepts anything from philosophical disciplines. Hence it must be inferior to these sciences from which it borrows. In reply Saint Thomas does not deny that sacred science will accept something from philosophical disciplines, as he is about to do in the whole of his Summa of that science, but he is very careful to specify the mode of this acceptance. Theology does not accept anything from philosophy because it requires it out of necessity, as a lower science does with regard to a higher science, but rather it does so in order to make more manifest what is presented in this science—ad majorem manifestationem.

Earlier, in article 1, Aquinas had argued that a need existed for a further or revealed teaching out of the indigence of philosophical disciplines as such, at least with respect to a proper knowledge of God and the final end of human life, but he had taken nothing away from the universal scope of philosophy. Here he explains that, formally speaking, theology accepts the principles on which it proceeds from no other science than God's as made known through revelation. It does not take from other sciences as if they were superior to it or contained its principles, as the higher sciences among the natural sciences contain the principles of the subordinate or lower sciences. Rather, theology usesthese sciences as inferiors or as servants, as the architect uses engineering and political authority uses the military. Moreover, it does so, not because of any defect or insufficiency of Sacred Teaching itself, but because of a defect or a weakness of our intelligence in grasping the teaching. By reason of this weakness our intelligence is led more easily into what is presented in this science through what is known through natural reason, from which the other sciences proceed.

We see here the famous conception of philosophy as handmaid of theology found among medieval theologians, but we also see how important philosophy becomes for theology conceived as a method of investigation into the truth of divine revelation, a fides quaerens intellectum. If we recognize the need for making what is revealed through faith more manifest to us, as Saint Thomas did, not by reason of a deficiency of truth in the revelation itself, but by reason of the difficulty we have in understanding it, then we have to recognize also the need for bringing in more from a philosophical reflection on experience, a point which is made in Saint Thomas's longer "discourse on method," the Commentary on Boethius's De Trinitate (In De Trin., q. 5, a. 4, c). No doubt this is why, precisely as a theologian, he became interested in the Philosopher, because he found the truth made manifest through his teaching more consonant to the teaching of faith.

But for philosophy to serve theology properly, a proper philosophical method or discipline had to be followed. This is where a certain confusion can set in in the interpretation of Saint Thomas, whether as a philosopher or as a theologian. He was very careful to distinguish between the two methods, especially with regard to the order of consideration. Theology began with a consideration of the Creator, thanks to divine revelation, something which philosophy alone could not do, while philosophy began with a consideration of creatures and strove, more or less successfully, to rise to some knowledge of their First Cause.²³ But at the same time Aquinas sought to combine both of these methods, apparently going in opposite directions, in his own systematic investigation and teaching. How could he do this without betraying or falsifying either method?

A brief reflection on the structure of the Summa Theologiae and the kind of arguments it incorporates may help answer this question.²⁴ Aquinas starts with God as One and Triune and then proceeds to speak of creation, which posits beings other than God in a kind of exitus, and then of creatures in their diversity, first of angels or pure spirits, then of merely material beings, and finally of human beings, who combine spirit and matter. Besides creation and the distinction of things he also treats of governance of the universe, or providence, before turning to the reditus of creatures to God, in part II, which is thought of mainly as taking place through human action in the quest for happiness through virtue, law, and grace. Part III presents Christ, the Church, and the Sacraments as a concretion of the means for reaching this End. There can be no doubt that we are dealing with a theological discipline. Throughout the work, however, we are presented with philosophical arguments to make more manifest different truths encountered along the way. Thus, at the beginning we find Five Ways for proving the existence of God, something which Faith already accepts, and in the subsequent discussion of what is meant by God and His attributes, we are treated with an elaboration upon metaphysical theory, including a good deal about act and potency, that is usually rooted in experience, much as Aristotle's was. Later on, in his account of the Six Days of Creation, we find Aquinas combining the scientific view of the cosmos he held with the biblical story. And in part II, on the reditus, which is the longest, by far, of all three parts, he devotes what many other theologians would have considered an inordinate amount of time to the Aristotelian ethic of virtue.

In all of this, it will be remembered, Saint Thomas is trying to make manifest truths found in articles of faith that are the principles of his science of theology. In doing so he adopts different strategies, depending on the truth in question. For those beyond the capacity of reason, he knows he has no strict proof, but he will offer analogies or even probable arguments. But for other truth more accessible to rational discourse and against errors, which could block the way to accepting supernatural truths, he will seek more strict philosophical arguments. His aim, as he says in article 8 of the methodical question I of the Summa Theologiae, is to teach his hearers so that they may come to an intelligence of the truth aimed at, which calls for reasons searching into the root of truth (rationibus investigantibus veritatis radicem) and making the hearers know in what way what is said is true (facientibus scire quomodo sit verum quod dicitur). Without that, if the teacher appeals only to authorities, the hearer may have certainty that things are as the teacher says, but he will acquire no science or intelligence and so depart empty (vacuus abscedet) (Quodlibet., IV, a. 18), full of conviction perhaps but with little understanding.

For anyone who has read Saint Thomas's Commentary on the Posterior Analytics it is clear that all this pertains to the language of demonstration, which is understood as meaning literally to make someone know (facere aliquem scire) or leading him to a conclusion through a middle term. But we must keep in mind that the same treatise also distinguishes between two kinds of demonstration, those that are a priori and those that are a posteriori (In I Post. Anal., lecs. 23-25). The first demonstrates what is the property of a thing using the definition of the thing as middle term. The second only demonstrates something about causes starting from their effects. Thus, if even with revelation we still do not know what God is, but rather what He is not, as Saint Thomas steadfastly held (S.T., 1, q. 3, Introduction), there will be little room for a priori demonstration in theology, except possibly where one might argue from the definition of an article of faith to a property implied in that definition. But Saint Thomas does little of that. He is more given to using demonstrations a posteriori, which is precisely the point at which philosophy is introduced into his theology as a way of making the truth more manifest.

The Ways of proving the existence of God are a perfect example of this. Before introducing them in question 2, article 3 of part I, he raises two key questions. First, he asks whether the proposition that "God is" is per se known, thus requiring no proof. It is clear to him that, if we knew what God is, we would know per se that He exists, since His essence is to exist or He is Esse per essentiam. To the wise, therefore, who would know this, it would be per se known that God exists. But not everyone is wise and there are those who deny the existence of God. For these at least, some demonstration would seem to be called for. In fact, because no one really knows what God is by definition, a demonstration is needed for everyone. Even if we could arrive at the thought of a being "than which no greater can be thought," as Saint Anselm in his seemingly a priori demonstration proposes, the validity of such a thought would still have to be demonstrated, which leads us to the second key question.

If the proposition "God is" is not per se known, then it requires some demonstration per aliud, that is, through something other than what is contained in that proposition. If, on the other hand, we cannot know what God is, which is not contained in that proposition, how can the proposition be demonstrated? Clearly not a priori, but only a posteriori, starting from the effects which are better known to us and can lead us back to their First Cause. This, of course, is more easily said than done, and the Five Ways of doing it that are then suggested can prove deceptively simple if we do not understand the philosophy of being and of the universe which underlies them. "We do not know God by seeing His essence, but we know Him from the order of the whole universe. For the very university of creatures is proposed to us by God so that through it we may know God, insofar as the ordered universe has certain imperfect images and assimilations of divine [things], which are compared to them as exemplary principles to images" (In De Div. Nom., c. 7, lec. 4, n. 729). The point is thus clear that we rise to the divine from the beings we know by sense, but as ordered; "from the order of the universe, as by a certain way and order, we ascend through intellect, as in our power lies, to God, Who is above all things" (ibid.).

This going from the order of creatures to the Creator is the essential order of philosophical method in Saint Thomas. The same order is followed to make manifest, not just the existence of God, but also many other points later on about His unity, His intelligence, His goodness, and so on. Even after it is proven that the proposition that "God is" is true, we still do not know what He is in Himself, and so we have to continue to use this kind of a posteriori philosophical argument to make the truth of His being or His attributes more manifest. It is as if, at each point on the high road of theological investigation, Saint Thomas found a way of reaching down into our human experience of the world, using Aristotle more than anyone else, to make manifest the truth he wanted to get at. We see the importance of the philosophical order of learning for the theologian that was Saint Thomas.

But we see also the difficulty of following his understanding of that philosophical order, if we emphasize only his Summa, where philosophy is brought in only in tandem to theological issues and according to a theological order, as Gilson has done in his The Christian Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Introduction, 8ff.). To be sure, a good deal of Saint Thomas's philosophy is included within his theology, and often those parts in which he shows the greatest originality, especially as regards the philosophy of being and creation. But to get a more complete and, one should add, a more rigorous picture of his understanding of the philosophical order in which the order of the universe figures more prominently, we must also look to his Commentaries on Aristotle and the Liber de Causis, the importance of which Gilson tends to belittle; that is where St. Thomas was following what he took to be the philosophical order of discussion.

It is not for nothing that Saint Thomas went to such considerable effort, even as a theologian, to comment on the works of the Philosopher. Nor was it just to free him from what he thought to be erroneous interpretations, which, according to his pregnant phrase, were often "repugnant both to the truth and to the intention of Aristotle" (In VIII Phys., lec. 8, n. 21). More positively, it was to develop the instrument he wanted for his theology, an instrument that had to be established in its own right. If the arguments sometimes seem too sketchy or too hasty in the Sum of Theology, it is often because they presuppose a more elaborate discussion found in the Commentaries. Passing references to the Philosopher, which occur throughout, should be read as a code for where to look for these more elaborate discussions, which then appear as part of the effort to make the truth manifest. Without the Commentaries a good deal of what is at issue in the Summa may escape us, as can be inferred from what we have already seen about the connection between the question of method in the Sumnm and the Posterior Analytics.

Moreover, it is not as if Saint Thomas were not philosophizing on his own in doing the Commentaries, which were part of a long tradition of a very special literary genre in antiquity, among the Arabs, and in the Christian Middle Ages. They were a vehicle for genuine philosophizing in which one took one's own position, not only with reference to the original text, but also with reference to other commentators.²⁵ They were, to use another pregnant phrase of Aquinas, a way of searching "more deeply into the intention of the author and how the truth of the matter may stand—quomodo se habeat veritas rerum" (De Spir. Creat., c. 10, n. 8). For Aquinas, reading an author, especially one he valued enough to comment on, was never just a search for opinions to borrow, as Gilson seems to suggest, but an exercise in critical reflection on both a text and reality. To read him in the commentaries is to catch him in the act of philosophizing, as Ducoin has pointed out so well,²⁶ or to see him elaborating upon his own philosophy when he seems to be only commenting on Aristotle.

Our aim here is to inquire into Saint Thomas's idea of the universe according to its philosophical order. To do this, therefore, we shall have to rely on his Commentaries on Aristotle as well as on the two Summae, along with the more complex Disputed Questions on Truth and on Power and his other Commentaries and shorter systematic works.²⁷ In this way we shall be able to follow Saint Thomas's idea, not just in the final theological form which it took, but in the way in which it emerged philosophically from experience. In this also we hope to be more faithful to Saint Thomas, not only historically, by presenting more of what he actually thought, whether it was original with him or happened to coincide with what others, like Aristotle or the Pseudo-Dionysius, had thought before him, but also systematically and philosophically, by drawing out the underlying philosophical outlook that is clearly in his mind but that is nowhere expressed in any single work. Ours is in some sense a task of reconstruction, therefore, one which we shall have to pursue on our own philosophical responsibility, but it will represent, as far as we can discern, what was truly Saint Thomas's idea of the universe. To assure this as much as possible we shall let Saint Thomas speak for himself through an appropriate selection of texts consonant with the various points in the development of the idea. In the process we shall keep running into Saint Thomas's theological outlook, as we already have in the analogy of the universe with an army, where the perfection of the universe or its internal form is already related to the extrinsic Good of the universe, the First Mover or God, to which the internal good is subordinated for Aquinas. Even in commenting on the Philosopher, Saint Thomas remains a Theologian. But we shall try to prescind from this theological reference as well as we can, though that will not always be possible, in order to focus on the articulation, from the ground up, so to speak, of the internal order of the universe itself, which Saint Thomas valued as the highest representation of the divine goodness and perfection and therefore thought of as most highly worthy of articulation in itself.

An Idea that Grew on Saint Thomas

It is interesting to note at the outset how this idea of the universe grew on Saint Thomas. Though there is some evidence of development in his thought on several scores in metaphysics as well as theology,²⁸ he was not given to the kind of modern self-consciousness that likes to insist on such development. He seldom adverts to any change of this sort in his thinking and, in two of the rare instances where he does, it is the idea of the universe that has come to impress itself more profoundly on him. The two instances have to do with subjects that may be of little interest to modern-day philosophers or theologians, the Empyrean and angels, but they are worth considering for a moment because of the way the idea of the universe is brought into play by our theologian-philosopher to explain his change of view.

In Quaestio Quodlibetalis, VI, a. 19, the question is raised as to whether the Empyrean, the highest or outermost of the heavenly spheres, had any influence on other bodies. For the Christians of the thirteenth century the Empyrean was thought of as the abode of the blessed. As such it was seen as a place of rest, and not a place of movement, so that the idea of its having any influence on other spheres or bodies was not immediately evident, whereas the other heavenly spheres and bodies, which were in motion, were thought of as having influence on the bodies here below in accordance with the Aristotelian cosmology. Yet the Empyrean was still seen as the outermost sphere and therefore as a part of the universe. Looking at the Empyrean in itself or as the abode of the blessed, therefore, one could say that it had no influence on the lower bodies. "There are some who maintain that the Empyrean heaven has no influence on other bodies, because it was not constituted for natural effects, but in order to be the place for the blessed." Saint Thomas adds, "this is what seemed to me to be the case at one time." But eventually he was led to reject such an exclusive or detached position for the Empyrean in favor of one more in keeping with a proper understanding of the priority of the universe as a whole. He argued as follows:

considering the matter more diligently, it seems that we must rather say that it does influence the lower bodies, because the whole universe is one according to a unity of order, as is evident from the Philosopher, XII Metaph. Now this unity of order comes into focus (attenditur) inasmuch as bodily beings are ruled through spiritual beings according to some order, and lower bodies through higher bodies, as Augustine says in III De Trin. Hence, if the Empyrean heaven had no influence on the lower bodies, the Empyrean heaven would not be contained under the unity of the universe: which is not fitting (quod est inconveniens).

The argument "from convenience," which we see formulated here as a result of more diligent consideration and which played such a prominent role in much of Saint Thomas's theology, was closely tied to the idea of the universe and, as will appear in the course of this study, had much more rational force than interpreters are inclined to give it today. For Aquinas it was a matter of greater reason, accessible, not just to faith through revelation, but also to a more diligent consideration through rational investigation.

The same kind of allusion to a development in his thought and to a more diligent consideration can be found in connection with the related question of angels, who were not thought of by Christians as occupying any particular material sphere, because they were pure spirits, but were thought of as ontologically superior to the entire realm of material being. Hence, considered in themselves, they could once again be thought of as independent of the material cosmos and therefore as having been created independently of that cosmos. In his treatment of the question, whether the angels were created at the same time (simul cum) as the visible world in De Potentia, q. 3, a. 18, Saint Thomas first gives the opinions of certain Fathers who had argued to a certain anteriority for the creation of angels by reason of their ontological superiority over the visible world, but again he points out that a more diligent consideration has led him to adopt the other view, which was also that of Augustine, as had been the case with the Empyrean.

If the other opinion is considered more diligently, which is that of Augustine and other Teachers, and which is also commonly held now, it is found to be more reasonable. For angels are not to be con-sidered only absolutely, but also insofar as they are part of the universe: and this consideration of them is all the more to be brought into focus (magis attendendum), inasmuch as the good of the universe takes precedence (praeeminet) over the good of any particular creature, just as the good of the whole takes precedence over the good of the part. Now insofar as angels are considered as parts of the universe, it is appropriate for them (competit eis) that they be established along with (simul cum) corporeal creation. For the pro-duction of one whole seems to be one.

It is easy to see that what makes this position more reasonable for Saint Thomas is precisely the idea of the universe.

Each one of these two instances has to do with the perfection of the universe. The one about the Empyrean, which deals with influence or interaction between levels of being, has to do with the ultimate perfection of the universe to be achieved through the action of its constituent parts. The one about the angels, which deals with the ontological constitution of beings, has to do with the first perfection of creatures and places us squarely at the juncture between the philosophy of being and the philosophy of the universe. "Every creature subsists in its own being (esse), has a form, through which it is determined in species, and has an order to something else" (S.T., I, q. 45, a. 7, c).

The Thomist understanding of the order of being, thus, does not take things in isolation from one another, or absolutely, but in relation to one another. St. Thomas distinguishes five stages in that order: "first, are the principles of things," which refers to esse and essence as well as form and matter; "second, there is the substance of things, constituted from the principles; third, the determination of the thing in its proper species, which is through form; fourth, from the form the thing gets perfection, not just in its specific being but also with regard to its proper action and end; fifth, the diverse things which each have some perfection in themselves, unified according to some order, actualize (perficiunt) a certain whole," namely, the universe (In De Div. Nom., c. 2, lec. 5, n. 197). The movement toward perfection or desire for the good is what pulls this order together, for "perfection and good which are in things outside the soul are thought of, not only according to something absolutely inherent in things, but also according to the order of one thing to another" (De Pot., q. 7, a. 9, c).

To study this order of being, or the universe, as Saint Thomas understood it, we shall proceed in two steps suggested by the texts we have just seen and the two analogies we saw for the universe, that of the house and that of the army. Part I will explore what can be called the ontological constitution of the universe according to the logic of perfection we have just seen emerge in conjunction with the order of being. In this we shall begin with the original idea of perfection as seen by Saint Thomas and examine how it is applied to the universe as a whole. Then we shall elaborate upon the kind of integrity that this kind of perfection entails. Finally we shall see how causal interaction provides the bond for this unity in diversity.

Once this picture of the house is completed, so to speak, Part II will then turn to the dynamic that flows from this ontological constitution of the universe or the manner in which the diversity of beings act together, as in an army, to achieve the ultimate perfection of the universe. There, after looking atthe continuity between the diverse degrees of being which interaction presupposes, we shall explore at some length each of the three orders of movement or action that Saint Thomas distinguished: the order of local motion or nature in its barest sense; the order of coming to be and ceasing to be, which rises to living and thinking beings; and finally the order of intelligence itself, which gathers everything else together and makes up for their imperfection. In conclusion we shall see how this ultimate perfection of the universe, according to Saint Thomas, was to be provided for by man in conjunction with God.

We shall be presenting Saint Thomas according to an order in which he did not entirely present himself, that is, as a philosopher. In this we recognize that we shall, in some sense, be performing a philosophical task of our own and exercising our own philosophical judgment. But we trust that it will also be in a way that will be faithful to Saint Thomas and his intentio profundior. Aquinas distinguished between two kinds of wisdom, in judging whether something is possible or impossible: "a mundane wisdom, which is called philosophy, which considers lower causes, namely, caused causes, and judges according to them, and a divine wisdom, which is called theology, which considers higher causes, that is, divine causes, according to which it judges" (De Pot., q. 1, a. 4, c). By "divine causes," as he went on to explain, he meant divine attributes such as divine wisdom, goodness, and will. But theologian that he was, he was still diligent in considering what he calls the caused causes, or the causes that constitute the universe, and in judging according to them. It is in this second respect that we wish to follow him here and explore his "mundane wisdom," the etymological connection of which with the idea of the universe or mundus should not go unnoticed.

I recognize also that this is not an easy task, but I undertake it with the same kind of probity and modesty that both Saint Thomas and Aristotle thought to be requisites for what was for them a difficult question, that of the stars. "We think it appropriate that a man's readiness to consider questions of this sort should be imputed more to diffidence, that is, to probity and modesty, than to boldness, that is, to presumption" (In II De Caelo, lec. 17, n. 450[1]). The underlined words are from the text of the translation of Aristotle, the paraphrase is from Aquinas. The condition for considering such questions, however, is that whoever does so must "pay diligent attention to small sufficiencies, that is, to reasons that suffice too little (parum sufficientes rationes), in order to discover something about these things, about which we have the greatest doubts." If we transpose this from questions about the stars to questions about the universe as a whole, we could say that probity and modesty should lead us to pay diligent attention even to the parum sufficientes rationes in this complex idea in order to bring out its fullness or completeness, that is, its perfection. We seek Saint Thomas's thought in the least of his writings as well as in the more important ones, for he often made very significant reflections in connection with seemingly insignificant or dated questions. The reason for this is precisely the one that St. Thomas adds to the text just quoted: "the desire that one has for philosophy, namely that its principles hold, that is, remain firm."

Our aim, then, is not to bring Saint Thomas up to date, something which seems neither possible nor necessary. It is not possible with regard to the model of the universe that he took for granted. The model has simply been supplanted and that is all there is to it. With regard to the idea of the universe, on the other hand, it does not seem to be necessary. It is enough for us to enter into the mundane wisdom it contains and come to a better understanding of its philosophy. May our effort not fall too far short of this goal.

Notes

¹ Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. L. K. Shook (New York: Random House, 1956); this work is a translation of the fifth edition of Le thomisme: introduction à la philosophie de saint Thomas d'Aquin (Paris: Vrin, 1948); Being and Some Philosophers, 2d ed. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1952); and The Elements of Christian Philosophy (New York: Omega, NAL, 1963).

² Foreword to The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, vii.

³ 3d ed. (Rome: Presses de l'Université Grégorienne, 1965). Originally written in 1938, this work was first published only in 1945 because of the war.

⁴La Participation dans la philosophie de saint Thomas d'Aquin, 2d ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1952).

⁵La communication de l'être d'après saint Thomas d'Aquin, 2 vols. (Paris-Louvain: Desclée de Brouwer, 1957 and 1959).

⁶Participation et Causalité selon saint Thomas d'Aquin (Louvain: Publications Universitaires de Louvain, 1961).

⁷ For example, in Natural Rectitude and Divine Law in Aquinas: An Approach to an Integral Interpretation of the Thomistic Doctrine (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1981), Oscar Brown takes care to give the "cosmic" background for St. Thomas's ethical doctrine, 9 and 156ff.

⁸Index Thomisticus: Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Operum Omnium Indices et Concordantiae, ed. Roberto Busa (Stuttgart: Fromann-Holgboog, 1975).

⁹ 2 vols. (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1946).

¹⁰ (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1957).

¹¹ Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936, repr. Harper Torchbooks, 1960).

¹²The Great Chain of Being, 52 and the accompanying note, 337f.

¹³The Great Chain of Being, chap. V, and throughout the book, including the treatments of "some internal conflicts in medieval thought."

¹⁴ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946).

¹⁵The Perfectibility of Man (New York: Scribner's, 1970), 11.

¹⁶ François Marty, La perfection de l'homme selon saint Thomas d'Aquin: ses fondements ontologiques et leur vérification dans l'ordre actuel (Rome: Presses de l'Université Grégorienne, 1962).

¹⁷ We are referring to certain ideas that Gilson first expressed in a paper read at the International Congress of Scholasticism held in Rome in 1950. An English translation of this paper appeared as "Historical Research and the Future of Scholasticism," Modern Schoolman, XXIX (1951), 1-10, and has been reproduced in A Gilson Reader: Selections from the Writings of Etienne Gilson (Paperback Image Book), 156-167. I shall quote the latter. The same views were expressed again by Gilson in his quasi-intellectual autobiography, The Philosopher and Theology, trans. Cécile Gilson (New York: Random House, 1962), (see especially the last chapter, "The Future of Christian Philosophy"), and have been followed by others, like Anton Pegis in his The Middle Ages and Philosophy: Some Reflections on the Ambivalence of Modern Scholasticism (Chicago: Regnery, 1963).

¹⁸C.G., II, c.4, n. 876a. See also the first chapters of C.G., I, where the way of philosophy in its search for truth, and ultimately for God, is discussed and shown to be arduous and difficult, time-consuming and fraught with dangers of error. These are the characteristics of the way of investigation; that one is a theologian or has simply the wisdom of Faith, does not lift one above these conditions, as one might be led to believe from Gilson's position. Though it is illumined from on high, Christian reason still needs manuductio, which follows a way of investigation and discovery, propter defectum intellectus nostri, as Saint Thomas himself says in S.T., I, q. 1, a. 5, ad 2 (see also a. 9, ad 1). I have gone into this relation between philosophy and theology at greater length elsewhere in order to bring out a way of being a disciple of Saint Thomas in philosophy more in keeping with Saint Thomas's own understanding in "Philosophy and Theology in Aquinas: On Being a Disciple in Our Day," Science et Esprit, XXVIII (1976), 23-53.

¹⁹La structure métaphysique du concret selon saint Thomas d'Aquin (Paris: Vrin, 1956), 29. The reference in Aquinas is to In De Causis, lec. 18 and lec. 10, where the position of Aristotle in some respect is also said to be more consonant with the teaching of faith—magis consona fidei doctrinae.

²⁰Les corps célestes dans l'univers de saint Thomas d'Aquin (Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1963), 9ff.

²¹Posterior Analytics, book II, chap. 19: knowledge of first premises is "like a rout in battle stopped by first one man making a stand and then another, until the original formation has been restored. The soul is so constituted as to be capable of this process."

²²Metaphysics, book XII, chap. 10. Note that Saint Thomas refers to this text as book XI in the text from the Commentary on the Ethics just quoted. In other places he more correctly refers to it as book XII. The reason for the discrepancies is explained by Wright as follows. "It will be noted that the reference of St. Thomas to this passage in Aristotle is sometimes given as 'in XII Metaph' and sometimes as 'in XI Metaph.' Prior to 1271 he always gave the reference as XI (though some editors trying to be helpful, frequently changed this to XII) and afterwards as XII. For in this year, William of Moerbeke's translation of the Metaphysics from the Greek made available to St. Thomas three books (K, M, and N) hitherto unknown to him, one of which (K) belonged before the one containingthe passage on the order of the universe (L)." See Wright, The Order of the Universe in the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, 2-3, note 2.

²³ See the texts referred to in note 18.

²⁴ A similar reflection could also be made on the Summa contra Gentiles, which also follows a theological order while using many philosophical arguments, but, given the difference in structure between these two works, to combine them here would needlessly complicate the point. The C.G. is divided into four parts, rather than three, because there Saint Thomas chooses to treat all the truths he considers accessible to reason in the first three parts, and reserves his treatment of those truths he considers as surpassing the capacity of reason even to discover, let alone understand, such as the mysteries of the Trinity, the Incarnation, or the Church, for a fourth part. In the first three parts, however, which could therefore be viewed as more philosophical, he still follows a theological order, starting from God and returning to God in his consideration of creatures according to the same scheme of exitus and reditus found in the S.T. Moreover, the reason for the quadripartite division rather than the tripartite is a theological one, the distinction between truths accessible to reason and those beyond its capacity, so that, strictly speaking, the C.G. cannot be said to be any more philosophical than the S.T. The latter maintains the same distinction, only it does so within the exitus-reditus scheme, and it uses as many philosophical arguments as the C.G. For a more complete discussion of this exitus-reditus scheme in the S.T., see M.-D. Chenu, Toward Understanding St. Thomas, trans. A.-M. Landry and D. Hughes (Chicago: Regnery, 1964), 310-18; Ghislain Lafont, Structures et méthode dans la Somme Théologique de saint Thomas d'Aquin (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1961). See also André Hayen, Saint Thomas d'Aquin et la vie de l'Eglise (Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1952), 77 ff.; La communication de l'être, vol. II, 183-86; "La structure de la Somme Théologique et Jésus," Sciences Ecclésiastiques, XII (1960), 59-82; and "Science sacrée et vie théologale," Sciences Ecclésiastiques, XV (1963), 21-34; XVII (1965), 111-34, 297-325.

²⁵ M.-D. Chenu, Toward Understanding St. Thomas, 203-22.

²⁶ G. Ducoin, S.J., "Saint Thomas commentateur d'Aristote," Archives de Philosophie, XX (1957), 81-82: "Or saint Thomas, même s'il est théologien, a commenté Aristote. Commentant Aristote le Philosophe, il a agi en philosophe.… une étude même sommaire des commentaires thomistes montre la part personnelle qu'y prend saint Thomas.… Aussi une étude précise des commentaires thomistes d'Aristote doit nous permettre de rejoindre l'acte de saint Thomas philosophant, c'est-à-dire saint Thomas élaborant sa propre philosophie dans l'acte par lequel il semble seulement commenter Aristote. Il s'agit bien de philosophie puisque saint Thomas endosse le personnage d'Aristote; et il est bien question d'une philosophie personnelle puisque saint Thomas ne se contente pas de reprendre purement et simplement ce qu'avait dit Aristote. Dans ces conditions un triple profit peut être tiré d'une telle étude. On doit pouvoir déceler l'attitude philosophique profonde de saint Thomas, son acte de philosopher. On peut également connaitre son art de commentateur. Et il ne doit pas être impossible d'assister en quelque facon à la genèse de sa philosophie." Consider also the remark of Cajetan: "Pluries glossat Aristotelem ut Philosophum, non ut Aristotelem; et hoc in favorem veritatis" (In IIa-IIae, q. 172, a. 4, ad 4), which is very much in keeping with a remark of Saint Thomas himself: "Studium philosophiae non est ad hoc quod sciatur quid homines senserint sed qualiter se habeat veritas rerum" (In I De Caelo, lec. 22, n. 228[8]).

²⁷ For a good catalogue of all of Saint Thomas's works, with bibliographical notes, see the Appendix to Gilson's Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, by I. T. Eschmann, 381-430. For a more updated list of which works are considered authentic, see the Index Thomisticus, which codifies 179 works in all, 100 thought to be authentic, 18 of dubious authenticity, and 60 known to be by other authors but long associated with the Thomistic corpus. See also "A Brief Catalogue of Authentic Works," in Friar Thomas D'Aquino: His Life, Thought, and Work, by James A. Weisheipl, O.P. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974), 355-405. For a good account of the cultural and intellectual climate in which these works of different genres were produced, see M.-D. Chenu, Toward Understanding St. Thomas, part 1, 11-199.

²⁸ For a brief indication of how some of this development took place from the Commentary on the Sentences to the Summae, see M.-D. Chenu, Toward Understanding St. Thomas, 272-76.