Thomas Aquinas's Summa Contra Gentiles: A Guide and Commentary by Brian Davies

Author:Brian Davies [Davies, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190456535
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-05-27T05:00:00+00:00

13.3 The Value of SCG 3,16–63

How shall we evaluate the positions adopted by Aquinas in SCG 3,16–63? We shall obviously take them to be worthless if we cannot follow Aquinas in holding that God exists and if we cannot follow him so as to think that people are more than what is purely material. We might, perhaps, readily concede that, as Aquinas holds, ultimate human happiness cannot consist just in the enjoyment of bodily pleasures and the like. After all, Aristotle, who did not share Aquinas’s notion of God, and who had no belief in life after death, was at one with Aquinas when it comes to the idea that human beings are most happy when engaging in contemplation or understanding.66 Yet why should we assume that anyone will be ultimately happy in the sense of “ultimately happy” that Aquinas has in mind in SCG 3,25–48?

You might say that, as a Christian theologian, Aquinas is entitled to suppose that we shall live having died and that God will ensure that we do so. In SCG 3, however, Aquinas seems not to be presuming Christian doctrine. He appears to reason philosophically, albeit that he frequently peppers his discussions with quotations from the Bible. SCG 3 seems to be following up on Aquinas’s promise in SCG 1,9 to consider, while following “the way of reason” (per viam rationis), what can be known of God, the coming forth of creatures from God, and the ordering of creatures to God as their end. But does it do so successfully?

It does not if we take it to rest on demonstrations to the effect that our souls will survive the death of our bodies. Nor does it do so if we take it to rest on demonstrative arguments concluding that any human soul enjoys the beatific vision. But Aquinas does not attempt to demonstrate either that our souls will survive our bodily death or that anyone is guaranteed to enjoy the beatific vision. As I have shown (see SCG 2,55), he argues that our souls are not perishable as are physical objects. He does not, however, take this conclusion to be equivalent to “Our souls have to survive the death of our bodies.” Whether they do or not is, for Aquinas, a matter of faith, as is the belief that some souls enjoy the beatific vision. When it comes to SCG 3,16–63, therefore, the question “Has Aquinas proved that our souls survive our death or that any human soul enjoys the beatific vision?” is irrelevant. More to the point would be the questions “Has Aquinas shown that we have a natural desire for the vision of God?” and “Has he shown that nothing short of the beatific vision can give us ultimate happiness?”

That people have a natural desire for what Aquinas calls “ultimate happiness” has been denied since to say that they do seems to imply that, by nature, people can arrive at a knowledge of what God is. The idea here is that we can

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