“TO BE TRUE” MEANS TO BE CREATIVELY THOUGHT
It is of course impossible to expound here the whole of St. Thomas’s doctrine of truth in all its ramifications. It is not, however, necessary to do so in order to define the purpose of the present study. Our study will be confined in the main to the notion of the truth of things in the world, of the veritas This is commonly understood as “ontological truth” and is distinguished from “logical truth,” the truth of knowledge. Yet it is not quite correct to dissociate too much these two concepts of truth. In St. Thomas’s mind they are intimately linked. For example, with the common modern objection, as it has been repeatedly formulated from Bacon to Kant, “that truth can be predicated not of what really exists but, in the strict and proper sense, only of what is thought,” St. Thomas would to a large extent agree. He would reply that this is quite to the point. Only what is thought can be called in the strict sense “true,” but real things are something thought! It is essential to their nature (he would continue), that they are thought. They are real precisely because they are thought. To put it more explicitly, they are real because they are thought that is, they have been fashioned by thought. The essence of things is that they are creatively thought. This is to be taken literally and not in a figurative sense. Further, because things are themselves thoughts and have the “character of a word” (as Guardini they may be called—in a quite precise and legitimate usage of the term—“true,” in the same way as one ordinarily calls true thoughts and what is thought.
It was, as it seems, St. Thomas’s view that the notion that things have an essence cannot be separated from the other notion: that this essential character is the fruit of a form-giving thought that plans, devises, and creates.
This interrelation is foreign to modern Rationalism. Why, it would argue, can we not think of the “nature” of plants and the “nature” of men without needing also to consider that these “natures” are called into being by thought? Modern thinking habits can make nothing of the suggestion that there could be no such “nature” unless it were thus creatively thought. Curiously enough, this thesis of St. Thomas has received unexpected and emphatic support in the principles of modern, indeed we might term it post-modern, Existentialism. From Sartre’s radical negation of the idea of creation (he declares, for example, that “Existentialism is nothing more than an attempt to draw all the conclusions from a consistently atheistic it is suddenly made evident how and to what extent the doctrine of creation is the concealed but basic foundation of classical Western metaphysics. If one were to compare the thought of Sartre and St. Thomas and reduce both to syllogistic form, one would realize that both start with the same “major premise,” namely from this principle: things have an essential nature only in so far as they are fashioned by thought. Since man exists and has a constructive intellect, which can invent and has in fact invented, for instance, a letter opener, therefore, and for no other reason, we can speak of the “nature” of a letter opener. Then, Sartre continues, because there exists no creative intelligence which could have designed man and all natural things—and could have put an inner significance into them—therefore there is no “nature” in things that are not manufactured and artificial. Here are his actual words: “There is no such thing as human nature because there exists no God to think it creatively.” n’y a pas de nature humaine, puisqu’il n’y a pas de Dieu pour la St. Thomas, on the contrary, declares: Because and in so far as God has creatively thought things, just so and to that extent have they a nature. “This very fact that a creature has its special and finite substance shows that it comes from a is a sentence from the Summa What is common to Sartre and St. Thomas, it is now evident, is the assumption that we can speak of the nature of things only when they are expressly considered as The fact that things are creatively thought by the Creator—this is exactly what St. Thomas means when he refers to the truth that dwells in everything that is real.