THE END OF “PURE” PHILOSOPHY
Let us again consider the opinion of St. Thomas concerning the inner structure of philosophy. It has been made evident that a dialogue between Thomas and contemporary Existentialists is possible only when the theological foundations of philosophical thinking are brought into play. Here, I believe, is yet another reason for the timeliness of St. Thomas: He accepts no such thing as a “pure” philosophy—a notion that is equally rejected by contemporary thought. Thomas has, of course, clearly distinguished between knowledge and faith, between philosophy and theology. To have established and maintained this distinction is considered his foremost achievement. Nevertheless, there is no “philosophy of St. Thomas” that can be presented in complete detachment from his theology.
The philosophical question aims at the mystery of the world; it is concerned with what things fundamentally are. What then does the term “fundamentally” mean? Thomas’s answer (this we have tried to develop) is that “fundamentally” means “in the Logos.” When Platonists are speaking of the “Ideal Forms,” then Thomas is speaking, as he himself declares, in the same sense, of the Divine Logos. Thomas’s exact words bring this out more “In place of these Ideal Forms harum we have one only: the Son and Word of In their respective interpretations of the world, the same “place” that is occupied in Platonism by the doctrine of the archetypes of all things and the soul, is taken in Western Christian ontology by the doctrine of the Logos, by the doctrine of the creative “art” of God “enriched with all primeval living forms,” to quote the splendid formula of How, under conditions such as these, could philosophical reflection be kept “pure” and unaffected by theology?
On the other hand, what is characteristic and stimulating and truly “timely” in Existentialist thought from Kierkegaard to Heidegger, Marcel and Sartre, is precisely this, that the ultimate positions are explicitly brought into view; although there is often enough no question of “theology” in the proper sense. Nevertheless, when Sartre, for example, maintains that there are no “essences” of natural things, and above all no “essence” of man, because there exists no creative God who could have designed it is evident that he is establishing this fundamental thesis of his philosophy on an “article of belief.” And it is clear that true philosophy can come into being only when it refers to a true theology. However, we can observe from the formal structure of contemporary Existentialism that a “pure” philosophy carefully separated from theology fails to satisfy men at the present time. When we consider the origin and archetypes of Western philosophical speculation, as conceived by Plato, who found the perfection of philosophy in a turning to myth and the ancients; as conceived by Aristotle, who named the philosophical doctrine of Being “theology”; as conceived by Augustine, for whom the true philosophical act begins with an act of faith—when we consider these seminal forms of the Western quest for knowledge, we realize that they might achieve a timeliness at once affirmative and corrective in the doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas; the reason being that this teaching is their most sober, most sharply defined, most decisively unifying realization. If only the structure of this doctrine were presented more clearly and convincingly before the minds of contemporary man!