INEXHAUSTIBLE LIGHT
What is the reason why St. Thomas states that the true Being of natural things is unfathomable, that the philosophical question cannot, in the last resort, be answered? Why does he say that it is impossible to express the essential reality of the world fully and exhaustively? In the first instance, this reason can still be framed in complete accord with Existentialism: We cannot wholly grasp the design, the archetypal pattern, of natural things.
From this formulation arise a number of considerations. In the first place, both St. Thomas and Sartre bring “design” and “essence” into the closest contact: where there is no design, there can be no essence. Things have an essence only in so far as they have been fashioned by a form-creating, knowing mind. In this sentence, too, there is a meeting of pre-modern and post-modern thought. In criticizing the philosophical atheism of the eighteenth century Sartre shows that he is in full agreement with the old doctrine of Being. It betrays, he declares, a sad lack of clear and logical thinking, when the concept of creation is abandoned but not the habit of talking about the “nature of things,” as though on that point nothing had changed. It is superficial, unreasonable, and even absurd to maintain that there is a “nature” of things, anterior to existence, unless one holds at the same time that things are
We touch now upon a second point. The verdict of St. Thomas that the design and essence of natural things cannot be wholly grasped by the human mind does not imply that these things are in no sense knowable. The essence of things, insists St. Thomas, cannot be completely grasped but it is not unknowable. Man’s intellectual power enables him to penetrate to the essence of things; there can be, therefore, insights and assertions concerning the nature of things which, though not exhaustive, are nevertheless true. A true answer can be given to the question: what is the deepest significance of Being.
It is at this point that the fundamental thesis of Existentialism is repudiated. It is not, however, in refutation, in the mere fact of negation, that the timeliness of St. Thomas’s teaching, as a corrective, consists. So much is clear: negation by itself is not sufficient. A corrective implies that there exists a genuine and specific correlation with the confronted thought. In what, then, consists this (negative) relevance? Precisely in this, that for St. Thomas, one and the same factor explains both why things cannot be entirely grasped and why they can be known. St. Thomas shows that the inscrutability of things is almost the same as their knowability.
This common root, to express it as briefly as possible, is the createdness of things, i.e., the truth that the designs, the archetypal patterns of things, dwell within the Divine Logos. Because things come forth from the eye of God, they partake wholly of the nature of the Logos, that is, they are lucid and limpid to their very depths. It is their origin in the Logos which makes them knowable to men. But because of this very origin in the Logos, they mirror an infinite light and can therefore not be wholly comprehended. It is not darkness or chaos which makes them unfathomable. If a man, therefore, in his philosophical inquiry, gropes after the essence of things, he finds himself, by the very act of approaching his object, in an unfathomable abyss, but it is an abyss of Asking the question of the essence of things, he also asks the question of their design and archetype, and with this he sets out on a principially endless way. If I restrict myself to inquiry into the chemical composition of a sheet of paper or the structure of an atom, I remain within the confines of an essentially answerable problem, in the sphere of definitive solutions. It is the sphere to which the sciences properly restrict themselves. But as soon as I glance, for example, at my pen, and begin to ask: What is this object?—not in the sense of expecting an answer such as: this is a tool, or, this is gold, but rather: “What is this portion of material reality in its truth and essence?”—as soon as I ask this in the true philosophical sense, I immediately and formally deal with the unfathomable and inscrutable; and this because it is in the nature of my question to approach to the roots of things, that is, to advance to the source of Being, the dimension of invention and form-giving design, in other words: the dimension of createdness.
What then is the reason why the philosophical question can receive no adequate answer? Why are real things, all real things, incapable of being finally grasped? (For to grasp, to comprehend a thing means to know it as completely as it is in itself knowable; to transform what is knowable in things, with no omission whatsoever, into actual knowledge, so that nothing remains which is not positively in It is for a comprehensive answer of this sort that the philosophical question is naturally seeking.) Why is a finite spirit unable to acquire, in the last resort, such a comprehensive knowledge? The answer is: because the knowability of Being, which we are attempting to transform into knowledge, consists in its being creatively thought by the
Hence our human knowledge is not confronted by a barrier of darkness; rather, there exists no sharply drawn frontier to which our mind can attain, and for this reason no “closed system” of philosophy is possible. But by this repudiation of closed systematic formulation, I am not suggesting that the wholeness of philosophy is to be lost in a chaos of confused questioning. The very light which, because it cannot be exhausted, invalidates the exclusive claims of any closed philosophical system, itself makes possible a highly coherent structure of thought. The fact that it derives from an ultimately inexhaustible divine Source, spurs us on in the performance of the philosophical act to a hope that strives toward the infinite.
In what then consists, positively and negatively, the timeliness of St. Thomas’s teaching? The answer: Inasmuch as we make our own the fundamental truths which it contains, we are enabled to recognize more deeply the “chance” of truth in contemporary philosophy and to accept it. Inasmuch as this “chance” is more deeply grasped and reasonably established, we are enabled—and this is more important—to show that the inherent dangers of contemporary philosophy are capable of being overcome, instead of having to be rejected as simply negative.
This one indication cannot of course exhaust the timeliness of St. Thomas’s teaching. We might examine many another thesis which, both from the positive and the negative viewpoint, would be as timely as his teaching that the philosophical quest for truth is conditioned by hope. The notion of bonum for instance, as St. Thomas understands it, appears to me of immediate political relevance in a world which is becoming increasingly a “totalitarian world of labor.” The same is true, and for similar reasons, of the doctrine of Natural Or, since the attention of modern philosophy is being particularly attracted by philosophical it would repay attention to note the fact that the most voluminous section of the Summa the second part, is constructed as a study of man and of man’s “true image.” But all this can be touched upon here only in passing.