[?] “In Opuscula at B.O., N breaks off at p. 200.”—Blehl.
[British Critic, vol. 30, July 1841.]
The name of Aquinas is almost synonymous with all that is popish, superstitious, sophistical, fanciful, and pedantic, in the minds of most of us. We conceive of this great oracle of the Church of Rome, as of one whose life was spent in his closet in busy trifling, in the incessant labour of abstract reasonings upon questions of fact or sacred doctrine, minutely followed out, ingeniously defended, and dogmatically enforced. If there is any thing harsh, corrupt and repulsive in the popular Roman theology, any possible narrowness in an Aristotelian, or any bigotry in a schoolman, we look upon St. Thomas of Aquinum as the type and model of it. Even in the most powerful exercise of his intellect, we expect nothing higher and nobler than the discussion how many spirits can stand on the point of a needle, or whether we are bound to love a possible angel more than an actually existing fly. Yet we now have before us the first portion of a Commentary on the Gospels, not composed indeed, but compiled by him, which certainly gives a very different idea of his character and talents, which has nothing in it but what is grave, impressive, and profitable, and put together with remarkable good sense and skill; and, stranger still, which really contains nothing at all, or next to nothing, of those corrupt tenets and opinions, which we so much deplore in Romanism.
That there is much in his theology, as well as in the notions of his age, which we cannot receive, and can only lament, need scarcely be said; but what we would insist upon, and what is most pleasant to observe, is, that whatever there was in his doctrinal views, which members of our own Church are unable to receive, be it less or more, still it does not interfere with the existence of a deep and broad substance of religious sentiment and opinion, which is the very same that is in esteem among ourselves, and, moreover, in the work before us is expressed in the very words of the primitive divines. In this work he seems to invite us and his own disciples, to lay our mutual differences aside, and to repose together under the shade of the ancient Church. He seems to say, “I will not enter into controversy with you for your new notions, your Protestantism, philosophism, and worldly wisdom, and I will not provoke you by what you consider my scholastic venturousness; but I challenge you to say what there is you can possibly object to in these extracts I shall put before you, from the writings of our common fathers in the faith; do not Augustine, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Leo, Gregory, approve themselves to your religious judgment? for they are the very guides which I too wish to follow. If there be any one vital point in our common religion, must it not be in the feeling with which we regard our Lord, His person, His teaching, His actions, as recorded in the Gospels? Now do not both parties take one and the same view of it, and one and the same with that which the ancient doctors and bishops took of it? Why then need we unduly magnify those secondary points in which we differ, when we agree in what is primary and more essential?”
We believe that an inspection of the history and writings of divines in the middle ages, would, in a very great number of cases, lead us to the same conclusion, viz. that, in spite of serious differences in formal profession, yet, in the tenor of their lives and the staple of their thoughts, serious men then were like serious men now, with only such varieties as the peculiarities of the human mind and the state of society render unavoidable. This is remarkably illustrated in the letters of our present author’s namesake, St. Thomas the Martyr, and his contemporaries, which, though of an highly ethical cast, yet, after striking out one or two sentences or phrases here or there, would not be recognized by any one as belonging to the school of Romanism.
More than this, we have no right or reason to expect in any age of the Church. It is impossible that truth ever should be taught, without its perversion attending on it, like its shadow. Truth of whatever kind, when received by a mind unfitted for it, necessarily becomes ipso facto a perversion and corruption. Error is the form which truth takes in unsuitable recipients, just as an oar looks crooked in the water. To desire that doctrinal corruption should not be in the Church, is to desire that good men and bad should not be mixed together in it; and to desire that it should not be prominent, is to desire that the elect should be the many; and the higher the truth, and the wider the field which it occupies, the more solid will be the substance, and the more huge the dimensions, of the error which apes it. And since superstition is the perversion of faith, therefore, while men are men, an age of faith will necessarily be an age of superstition; and in like manner, an age of zeal will be an age of violence; and a theological age, an age of dogmatism and bigotry; and again, an age of benevolence, on the other hand, will be an age of laxity. And, moreover, sometimes the very same men will be examples both of the grace and its perversion; and much more, for one man who is a pattern of the grace, shall we have a hundred specimens of the perversion. St. Augustine had to oppose himself to the Pagan superstitions of Catholics in his day, as well as the Protestants of Exeter Hall now; and the Protestant teacher of this day has to warn his followers against the Antinomianism with which he may be indoctrinating them unwittingly, and which St. Augustine could find only in the Gnostic or Manichee. That the age then in which Aquinas lived was superstitious or bigoted, nay even were he such himself, need tell us little against his substantial faith and holiness, as the fact that our age, or ourselves are presumptuous, tells against our religious vitality; and it is a great satisfaction to find from such works as that before us, that what is abstractedly possible, was, in the case of this great man, true in matter of fact.