Folia Theologica 17. (2006)

Hugh Barbour: Salvare Apparentia

316

H. BARBOUR

other system is able to turn to its own use doctrines contrary to its own, as long as they are intelligible?

Then he speaks to the suppostion of the primum mobile:

Ad hoc dicendum est quod, si primum movens non ponitur motum ex se, oportet quod moveatur immediate a penitus immobili. Unde etiam Aristoteles sub distinctione hanc conclusionem inducit: quod scilicet apportent vel stati7n devenire ad primum movens immobile separatum, vel ad movens seipsum, quo iterum devenitur ad movens primum immobile separatum.

One thing is certain, if there is no primum mobile, then the whole apparatus of the pre-copernican cosmology is dismantled. Yet here, St. Thomas presents its existence as a matter of indifference to his argument, a mere optional detail which does not affect the integrity of its demonstrative force. The inference to be drawn is clear. As long as one parts from motion, then the argument from motion can be cogently undertaken and quite independently of any particular cosmological model.

There remains, however an even more telling treatment of the philosophy of nature. In his early, rather first, opusculum commonly called De principiis naturae, on the principles and causes of mobile being, St. Thomas sums up the essence of Aristotelian cosmology in a manner which utterly transcends any possibility of being rendered outmoded by subsequent scientific discoveries. In this work he takes as the primary analogate of movement the production of an artifact, the now proverbial bronze statue of Socrates. The whole elaboration of the hylomorphic system, the termini of generation and corruption, the four causes and their interrelation, the intervention of intelligent causes in material beings, and the nature of the analogy of being depend here on this single example. Human art, as being better known quoad nos, provides the imagination with an example which is perennially valid: the eduction of artificial form from a material subject by an intelligent agent acting for an end. It is in the light of such an anthropological example that the rest of nature, the moving cosmos, can be understood. Here is a foundation which is utterly independent of any scientific theory of the universe, simply and elegantly accessible to experience and reasoned reflection. Later in life, in the introductory passages of his