Judging a book by what it doesn’t cover

In his encyclical Aeterni Patris, Pope Leo XIII called for a “restoration of Christian philosophy.” He was quite specific about what he had in mind:

[D]aily experience, and the judgment of the greatest men, and, to crown all, the voice of the Church, have favored the Scholastic philosophy.

Indeed, he was even more specific than that:

Among the Scholastic Doctors, the chief and master of all towers Thomas Aquinas…

We exhort you, venerable brethren, in all earnestness to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas, and to spread it far and wide for the defense and beauty of the Catholic faith, for the good of society, and for the advantage of all the sciences… Let carefully selected teachers endeavor to implant the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas in the minds of students, and set forth clearly his solidity and excellence over others.  Let the universities already founded or to be founded by you illustrate and defend this doctrine, and use it for the refutation of prevailing errors.

Other popes have echoed the theme.  For example, Pius X, in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, wrote: “[L]et Professors remember that they cannot set St. Thomas aside, especially in metaphysical questions, without grave detriment.”

Before certain readers start hyperventilating, I should pause to note that my point is not to argue from papal authority for the superiority of Aquinas.  If you think Leo, Pius, et al. were wrong -- for example, if you think Scotus is a better guide to metaphysical questions, or if you think Scholasticism in general is wrongheaded, or if you couldn’t care less in the first place about what the popes have to say -- well, for present purposes none of that is either here or there.  My point is rather to explain how the term “Scholastic” came to have a certain connotation.  In the decades after Leo’s encyclical appeared, the Neo-Scholastic movement sought to implement his program.  One key feature of this movement was that its representatives tended to treat Thomism as normative for Scholastic thinking more generally.  Scotist and Suarezian positions were taken seriously and sometimes adopted, but the default position tended to be Thomistic.  Another key feature was that the Neo-Scholastics were keen to emphasize that Scholasticism is not a museum piece but a living tradition that offers a serious response to modern assumptions in philosophy.  Accordingly, the emphasis in Neo-Scholastic works was not on historical scholarship but rather on articulation of the structure of the Scholastic system and application to contemporary problems.

These tendencies by no means reflected a blind submission to papal authority.  The Neo-Scholastics had arguments for the view that Scholastic, and in particular Thomistic, positions were superior to those of the modern systems of thought (rationalist, empiricist, idealist, etc.) that had supplanted Scholasticism.  And they had arguments for the view that the departures from Thomism represented by writers like Scotus, Ockham, and Suarez were often harmful to the integrity of the Scholastic system, and inadvertently contributed to the dissolution of the Scholastic synthesis and rise of the modern systems.  A reasonable person can disagree with these views, but they represent a coherent and well thought out philosophical position.

It is one I happen to agree with, and my book Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction is very much written in the spirit of this approach.  It is not an exercise in antiquarianism.  It is not written for historians of philosophy, or for Latinists, or for those who are interested in the minutiae of intra-Scholastic debate over the centuries.  It is written for people interested in understanding the framework of Scholastic thinking about fundamental metaphysical questions, and how it relates to controversies in contemporary analytic philosophy.  So, if you are the sort of anal retentive academic historian of philosophy who thinks that (say) a definitive history of the early 14^th century dispute over universals must be written before we can begin tentatively to think about gesturing towards a recovery of the point of view from which the question of contemporary application might someday be asked… well, my book is not for you. 

The book is also written from a decidedly Thomistic point of view.  I discuss the views of Scotus, Ockham, and Suarez where they disagree with Aquinas, because the reader should know where and why Scholastic metaphysicians differ with one another.  But the book is not about these intra-Scholastic disputes, and it does not attempt to settle them to the satisfaction of Scotists, Ockhamists, and Suarezians.  Rather, the book is about the dispute between, on the one hand, what I take to be the strongest version of Scholasticism, and on the other hand the various metaphysical views which prevail within modern philosophy, and within analytic philosophy in particular.

I am quite explicit about these aims of the book, and it is in light of those aims that the book should be judged.  Now, Michael Sullivan of the Scotist blog The Smithy (and, I think, a friend of this blog), has just posted the first in a series of posts reviewing my book.  He more or less acknowledges its specific aims, and assures us that “a book review ought to evaluate a book on the basis of its own goals, not our expectations for what a different sort of book might have been had the author cared to attempt it.”  Unfortunately, the then goes on to evaluate the book precisely on the basis of his expectations for what a different sort of book might have been had I cared to attempt it.

In particular, Sullivan is irritated that I do not have more to say about Scotus, Ockham, and Suarez, that I rely on English translations rather than Latin originals, and that I’m too beholden to relatively recent Neo-Scholastic works.  He develops his complaint at some length, though he has (so far, anyway) nothing to say about what is actually in the book, only about what is not in it.  Had I been writing a neutral historical account of all the various thinkers and arguments that have fallen under the label “Scholastic,” Sullivan’s complaints would have been reasonable.  But as Sullivan himself is well aware, that is not what I was trying to do.  And given the actual aims of the book, Sullivan’s complaints seem to me to be rather silly. 

Sullivan says that my book is not “scholarly.”  By that he means that it does not emphasize primary sources, does not cite works in the original languages, is not historically comprehensive, etc.  And that is indeed the kind of thing that characterizes a “scholarly” work of history, say.  But there is another sense in which a work might be “scholarly,” which is operative in works of philosophy that are not primarily concerned with history.  It has to do with knowing the current state of discussion, mastering the relevant literature, adhering to academic standards of argumentational rigor rather than aiming for a “pop” audience, etc.  I submit that my book, judged by its actual aims, is very much a scholarly one in that sense. 

That is a kind of scholarship I commend to Sullivan and other non-Thomist Scholastics.  Every so often at The Smithy one finds expressions of annoyance at the tendency to treat Aquinas as the Scholastic gold standard.  That’s understandable.  Scotus, Ockham, and Suarez were thinkers of genius and certainly deserve more attention than they get.

But here’s the thing.  Thomists have, for over a century and with renewed vigor in recent decades, been putting forward Scholastic arguments in the context of contemporary mainstream debates in metaphysics, natural theology, philosophy of mind, ethics, and other areas.  They have made it clear that these are arguments with contemporary relevance, not mere museum pieces.  Naturally, given that they are Thomists, their brand of Scholasticism has been Thomistic.  And naturally, they have been less concerned with history-of-philosophy spectacle-cleaning than with presenting an argument in its strongest possible form, regardless of whether this or that Scholastic presented it exactly that way.   If many people think of Aquinas and Thomism when they think of Scholasticism, that’s a big part of the reason. 

If Scotists and Suarezians really want non-Scholastics to take their own heroes as seriously as they take Aquinas, they need to do more of this sort of thing themselves.  They need to get out of the library stacks and into the debate.  They need to avoid getting so absorbed with doing “scholarship” that they forget about doing philosophy.  They need to worry less about the history of Scholasticism and more about the future of Scholasticism.  That would seem to be a more productive use of their time than complaining that Thomists haven’t been adequate publicists for Scotus and other non-Thomists.