Folia Theologica 17. (2006)
Hugh Barbour: Salvare Apparentia
SALVARE APPARENTIA 317 commentary on the metaphysics of Aristotle, St. Thomas will work out at length a theory of the genesis of philosophical wisdom from the examination of human art. In the light of all this, the post-copernican sceptics who require that we jettison the scholastic synthesis of St. Thomas can be compared to those who would say "We have discovered that the statue of Socrates is not bronze, but silver. Thus we cannot be sure anymore if it is really a statue of Socrates, or even a statue at all. Everything has changed. What are we to do?" We are justified in posing the question: "Is the problem of modernity in theology based on a fallacy?" and we are justified in answering "Yes it is; modernity in theology is a pastoral, not a scientific problem." As it is, in the De principiis naturae St. Thomas has provided a key to the intelligibility of nature which could even satisfy some contemporary semioticians. Here I am thinking of the likes of Umberto Eco, that most simpatico, even if perniciously so, of atheists. St. Thomas begins with the aesthetic and poetic experience of sculpture, a making according to form, and from there finds the causal meaning underlying the variable, mobile universe. Here is a true "theological aesthetics." For St. Thomas intelligibility, even knowledge through causes, is not dependent on scientific certitude in the modern sense. It is enough for reason to be sure of its insight, to have satisfed its own innate desire to measure itself adequately against the realities initially perceived through the senses. Even a logically perfect definition can lack absolute certainty, and still remain a genuine exercise in human intelligence. To know truly one does not have to know perfectly or exhaustively. In his treatment of the nature of the definition of composite essences in the opusculum which was contemporaneous with the De Principiis Naturae and a companion volume to it, namely the De Ente et Essentia, St. Thomas shows himself at one and the same time deeply conscious of the limits of human knowledge, and confident that, for what little it can ascertain, human knowledge has a genuine hold on the inner natures of things. Notice how he characterizes the specific difference which serves in a definition of the nature of a composite, mobile being:
