Ludwig Feuerbach: Lectures on the Essence of Religion. Ralph Manheim translation. New York: Harper and Row, 1967 [1846].

Ludwig Feuerbach: Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. Manfred Vogel translation. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1986 [1843].

 

Although he attended many lectures offered by G. W. F. Hegel at the University of Berlin, Feuerbach broke with his professor on the question of materialism, rejecting Hegel’s dialectical immanentism. He also firmly denied both the Creator-God of the Bible and any suggestion of philosophic dualism. He was a thoroughgoing materialist, although not a ‘dialectical materialist,’ like his younger contemporary, Karl Marx.

Students at the University of Heidelberg, where Feuerbach had attended classes before transferring to Berlin, invited him to deliver a series of thirty lectures on “the Essence of Religion,” which he published in 1846. Speaking shortly before the revolutionary year of 1848, Feuerbach began by observing that “today every man, even if he supposes himself to be supremely nonpartisan, is at least theoretically a partisan, though he may not know it or want to be,” since “today political interest engulfs all other interests and political events keep us in a state of constant turmoil.” Indeed, “today it is actually the duty—especially of us nonpolitical Germans—to forget everything for the sake of politics”; more, “mankind” itself “must at certain times forget all other tasks and activities for the sake of one particular task and activity if it wishes to achieve something complete and worthwhile.” Inasmuch as religion “is to be sure closely connected with politics,” and we now “demand that the word become flesh, the spirit matter,” having become “as sick of political as we are of philosophical idealism,” we are “determined to become political materialists.” Feuerbach’s critique of religion serves as the foundation of a republican politics, a ‘youth movement.’ At around the same time, Tocqueville would publish his book on the French Revolution, remarking that it was the political inexperience of the French revolutionaries that led to the Terror. Feuerbach does not consider that possibility, and neither would most Germans, for the next hundred years.

“Truly free, uncompromising, unconventional thinking, thinking that aspires to be fruitful, not to say decisive, requires an unconventional, free, and uncompromising life,” he tells his young listeners. “And anyone who wishes in his thinking to get to the bottom of human affairs must have his two feet physically, bodily on their foundation,” namely nature, “cast[ing] aside all extravagant, supernatural, and unnatural ideas and fantasies.” Readily seeing through the calculated ambiguities of Bacon and Hobbes (he had written a study of Bacon’s philosophy, published in the 1830s), he sees, adopts, and advocates their materialism, while reserving especial praise for Spinoza, “the only modern philosopher to have provided the first elements of a critique and explanation of religion and theology; the first to have offered a positive opposition to theology; the first to have stated, in terms that have become classical, that the world cannot be regarded as the work or product of a personal being acting in accordance with aims and purposes; the first to have brought out the all-importance of nature for the philosophy of religion.” In response to Spinoza, Leibniz is “the first modern German philosopher” to earn “the honor, or dishonor, of having once again tied philosophy to the apron strings of theology,” an effort Feuerbach ridicules as the philosophical equivalent of the astronomical contortions of Tycho Brahe, who vainly attempted to combine elements of the Copernican system with the system of Ptolemy that it had correctly replaced. To mix philosophy and theology, as Leibniz attempts, can result only in “a monstrosity” because theology holds only the sacred as true, “whereas to philosophy, only what it holds true is sacred.” “All my works have been written in opposition to a period when every effort was made to force mankind back into the darkness of bygone centuries,” the centuries before the modern Enlightenment. Even the pious philosophers of earlier centuries understood the need to separate philosophy and religion, “arguing that religion is grounded on divine wisdom and authority, while philosophy is grounded solely on human wisdom.” But “the most recent philosophers”—Leibniz but, more impressively, Hegel—stand for “the identity of philosophy and religion, at least as far as content and substance are concerned.” “I criticized the Hegelian philosophy,” with its dialectical immanentism, its ‘Absolute Spirit,’ “for regarding the essential as nonessential and the nonessential as essential in religion.” Against this, I, Feuerbach, declared the essence of religion to be “precisely what philosophy regards as mere form,” immaterial in both senses of the word. “I replaced the abstract, merely cogitated cosmic being known as God by the reality of the world, or nature,” while also replacing “the rational being deprived of his senses, which philosophy has extracted out of man, by the real, sensuous man endowed with reason.” There is, for example, no immortality of the individual human ‘soul.’ “Intellectual, ethical, or moral immortality is solely the immortality a man gains through his works,” and his soul, animating those works, is only “what he passionately loves, what he does with passion,” and “men’s souls are as diverse, as particular as men themselves.” Feuerbach thus full-throatedly endorses not only the materialism of the moderns but the individualism of the moderns and the ‘democracy’ of the moderns, their esteem for liberty defined as doing what one likes, passionately.

Accordingly, rightly understood, “theology is anthropology” because it “expresses nothing other than the deified essence of man”; that is what ‘revealed religion’ reveals. Overlying nature, convention skews man’s conception of himself and therefore his conception of the divine; “the pagan is a patriot,” his gods the gods of his polis, while “the Christian is a cosmopolitan” whose God is universal. Universalism thrives on the habit of generalization, abstraction, and sure enough, “Christianity is idealism, an edifice crowned by a natureless God or spirit who makes the world by merely thinking and willing, and apart from whose thinking and willing the world has no existence.” But, Feuerbach asserts, there is only nature—no ideals and no God or gods. The only difference between human nature and the rest of nature is human consciousness; he intends to awaken that consciousness to the emptiness of religious belief (in these lectures) and of philosophic idealism (in Principles of the Philosophy of the Future), to “demonstrate that the powers which man worships and fears in his religious life, which he seeks to propitiate even with bloody human sacrifices, are merely creatures of his own unfree, fearful mind and of his ignorant unformed intelligence.” Morally and politically, this means that he wants “man, who is always unconsciously governed and determined by his own essence alone, may in future consciously take his own human essence as the law and determining ground, the aim and measure, of his ethical and political life.” No fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. This will begin the project “to transform theologians into anthropologists, lovers of God into lovers of man, candidates for the next world into students of this world, religious and political flunkeys of heavenly and earthly monarchs and lords into free, self-reliant citizens of the earth.” 

“Hear, O Israel.” Religious men hearken to nature’s terrifying thunder, a noise perceived through “the ear, the organ of terror”—the ear, which is “the womb of the gods.” Feuerbach goes so far as to claim that “if man had only eyes, hands and the senses of taste and smell, he would have no religion, for all these senses are organs of critique and skepticism.” The fear and love commended by religions are passions of dependency, not self-reliance. The ultimate sign of human helplessness is mortality: “If man did not die, if he lived forever, if there were no such thing as death, there would be no religion.” Belief in immortality is man’s defense against death (presumably including Feuerbach’s work, which he could only justify by saying that it is an effort to achieve the only possible form of immortality). Primitive man worships nature, which he deifies; Feuerbach calls this religion but not theism, a term he reserves for belief in a god or gods distinct from nature and man. “It is theism, theology, that has wrenched man out of his relationship with the world, isolated him, made him into an arrogant self-centered being who exalts himself above nature.” “In religion man projects his essence,” but primitive man (with unintended modesty) merely projected his sensations, having yet to develop the abstract thought that enables him to conceive of an abstract or spiritual god. Primitive man is entirely dependent upon nature; religion registers human dependency; primitive religion deifies nature because primitive man fears nature, divinizes it, hoping to propitiate the imagined divinities that are nothing more than aspects of nature. We should not make this mistake, return to paganism, “since man’s true culture and true task is to take things as they are, to make no more, but also no less of them than they are. Nature religion, pantheism, makes too much of nature”—the earth is indeed our mother, but we are now adults— while “conversely, idealism, theism Christian make too little of it, and indeed ignore it.”  Politically, this means that while we should understand but not follow the pagans in making “the nature in which they lived and breathed, to which alone they owed their individual character, in short, the nature of their country, [into] an object of religious worship,” modern man might still respect “the nature of this country,” his country, “for it is to this country alone that I owe my life and what I am.” “How untrue we Germans have become to our source, our mother, and how unlike her, thanks to Christianity which taught us that heaven is our home.”

Feuerbach further claims that egoism is the essence of religion, “the self-assertion of man in accordance with his nature and consequently of his reason.” Since “to man life is the supreme good,” man inclines to idolize, to deify, anything that protects or enhances his life. But these idols are in fact “dependent on man; they are gods only insofar as they serve his being, as they are useful, helpful, appropriate to it.” Christianity only replaced paganism when the idols were seen as useless, “because the pagan gods did not give them what they wanted,” whereas the Christian God is the “very essence and likeness” of man himself, who by now had begun to think abstractly, therefore seeking a universal, all-knowing, all-powerful deity. This enables ‘we moderns,’ we post-Christians, to discover the “ultimate subjective ground of religion in human egoism,” human desire. Aristotle’s god, the ‘god of the philosophers,’ gains no adherents among most people because it is neither a helpful nor a harmful god. It is useless. “In calling egoism the ground and essence of religion, I am not finding fault with religion,” which only reflects the nature, the essence of man in this regard. Rather, Feuerbach faults an ‘idealistic’ religion that holds man above nature, “tak[ing] an unboundedly egoistic, contemptuous attitude toward nature,” exhibiting an egoism no longer bounded by the limits of nature alone, as seen “in the Christian belief in miracles and immortality,” evidence of “an unnatural, supernatural, and chimerical egoism, exceeding the limits of necessary, natural egoism.”

But if religion expresses natural human egoism, why do so many religions commend self-abnegation? Because a man might be a fanatic, carrying his natural feelings too far. Or he might hope “to gain the favor of his gods, who grant him everything he desires”—a cunning, self-serving self-abnegation, “only a form, a means of self-affirmation, of self-love.” This is the psychology of religious sacrifice, whether the sacrifice of animals, or “bloody human sacrifice” seen among pagans, or Christian sacrifice, which partakes “of a different, namely, psychological, spiritual order,” a sacrifizio dell’intelleto. In the spirit of Machiavelli, Feuerbach alleges that “the Church has at all times advocated moral, spiritual, and mental self-emasculation.” Christians are communists, “but communists out of egoism”; their “generous, imposing sacrifices” do not differ in principle” from “foul and niggardly sacrifices.” It is true that any attempt to combat “human egoism in the highly developed sense” amounts to “sheer absurdity and madness,” since “the design underlying all human impulses, strivings, and actions, is to satisfy the needs of human nature, human egoism.” But only with full ‘consciousness’ of the grounding of self-interest in nature, with no supernatural confusion added.

It is noteworthy that in the first nine of this series of thirty lectures, Feuerbach makes no arguments. He asserts. It may be that his failure to philosophize serves a rhetorical strategy, saying atheistic things that will shock many among his young audience while encouraging those who already deny the existence of God. He begins his tenth lecture in much the same style. It is egoism, he claims, that makes dependency possible (“where there is no egoism, there is no feeling of dependency”) and it is egoism that revolts against dependency (“I love freedom of movement”). Human beings are dependent, but not upon God. “How untrue we Germans have become to our source, our mother, and how unlike her, thanks to Christianity which taught us that heaven is our home.” Be true to yourselves, young Germans; turn away from religion to nature and to Fatherland.

But now he begins to philosophize, taking aim at the “cosmological proof” of God’s existence, that there must be some ultimate Cause-of-causes, some First Mover of all subsequent movements in nature. Feuerbach dismisses this as proof only of human psychological neediness, not of the existence of God. “This need of mine to break off the endless series is no proof of a real break in the series of a real beginning and end.” “God” is only a name for our own inability to discern the true origin of things, or indeed if there was an origin at all, since the cosmos might be eternal. And “what is to prevent me from going beyond God?”—continuing the inquiry into what came before “In the beginning….” As far as we can see, “Nature has no beginning and no end”; politically (as it were) this means that “nature does not culminate in a monarchic summit; it is a republic.” Continuing to follow the evidence presented by his senses, Feuerbach says, “I cannot derive my body from my mind—for I have to eat or to be able to eat before I can think.” Reason presupposes my senses; my senses do not presuppose reason. “No more, or perhaps even less, can I derive nature from God.” That “the world of the senses is real” is an ineluctable truth in psychology, anthropology, and philosophy. Only the religions deny this, and neither do they, initially, since “Man’s first belief is his belief in the truth of the senses,” the foundation of “nature religion.” “The first beings of whom man had immediate certainty and consequently his first gods were sensuous objects”; more, “men’s senses were themselves his first gods.” He has no philosophic need for any others, inasmuch as “what a man does not know by his own lights, he does not know at all.”

What is nature? It is “the sum of all the sensuous forces, things, and beings which man distinguishes from himself as other than human.” Nature is no god but “a manifold, public, actual being which can be perceived with all the senses.” The physical attributes of the Biblical God—power, eternity, infinity—are all “rooted in nature.” His moral attributes are rooted in human nature, attributes that make Him useful to man. God’s moral and also his intellectual traits are nothing more than projections of natural human capacities upon an imaginary perfect being, proving that man is indeed egoistic. The infinity attributed to God only proves that man is “infinitely fond of himself,” ready to worship his own image. “In theology,” as distinguished from psychology, anthropology, and philosophy, “things are not thought and willed because they exist, they exist because they are thought and willed.” It is a teaching that inverts “the order of nature,” an inversion that is in a sense natural to man, even if mistaken, because man is rational, a being that “sets the class or class concept before the species and individuals, the abstract before the concrete”; “this explains and resolves all the difficulties and contradictions arising from attempts to explain the world as God’s creation,” a something inexplicably created out of nothing. “God is nothing other than the sum of generic concepts,” concepts generated by the human mind’s natural inclination to think of such abstractions as time and space, then to assume that these exist prior to the real things, the material, sensually perceived things. That is, abstractions are concepts, constructed in the human mind, which constructs or ‘creates’ by its nature—still another godlike attribute of human nature that human beings naturally attribute to their gods. Language itself abstracts, unable to express the particular, and so takes over our minds, making our minds think abstractly. Those among us who don’t think too much, those “who are more concerned with life than with study, who spend more of their time out of doors than in libraries, whose occupations and temperaments lead them to observe real beings,” understand this better than bookish pedants and priests.

Feuerbach is careful not to dismiss abstractions entirely. “I do not deny the existence of wisdom, goodness, beauty; I deny only that these class concepts are independent beings, either as gods, or as attributes of God, or as Platonic Ideas, or as self-positing Hegelian concepts; I merely maintain that they exist only in wise, good, beautiful individuals” as their attributes, as “characteristics or determinations of individuality,” not as “beings in themselves.” In terms of physical nature, my form consists of the outer limits of my body; someone can trace the outline of my body if I lie down on a large piece of cardboard, but that outline abstracts from my body itself, having no reality beyond the ink or carbon left behind by the instrument that traced it.

Feuerbach next turns to a refutation of the teleological proof of God’s existence, often called the argument from design—the Apostle Paul’s testimony, that the perceivable order of the world implies an ‘orderer,’ God. Feuerbach rejoins that “what man interprets as the purposiveness of nature is in reality nothing other than the unity of the world, the harmony of its causes and effects, and in general the all-embracing order of things in nature,” one that “gives man the impression of wisdom and purposiveness in nature,” but does not prove it. Feuerbach equally denies that the world “owe[s] its existence to any accident,” the “patently irrational notion” that it derived from “the fortuitous clash of atoms,” a fantasy “tantamount to explaining the genesis of a literary work, the Annales of Ennius, for example, by a chance combination of letters.” The sum of things does not exist due to intention or to chance, as far as perceiving and reasoning man can know. Being is ‘because’ it is, not ‘in order for’ anything or by fortunate concatenation. We only know that the universe is, not how or why, and we know that it is thanks to our senses, our only means of knowing anything. 

And even if teleology were real, this wouldn’t prove the existence of God or gods. “God is merely the hypostasized and objectified essence of the human imagination.” We “can give no reason for a natural law,” even if “analogy leads us to the belief, or rather the certainty, that the law has a natural cause.” To infer the existence of God from the natural order is to confuse nature, which is a ‘republic’ in which all elements interplay, with a monarchic Being who acts miraculously, counter to nature, by fiat. There “is only one regime” in nature, a republic. In human nature, “my head may be the president of my life, but it is not an absolute monarch, king by divine right,” having the same substance “of flesh and blood” as the stomach, the heart, or any of the other organs. It rules but “does not differ from them in kind, in race,” exerting no “despotic power.” if it “tries to play the prince and make unnatural demands” on the other organs it will be “stripped of its command.” And “just as a republic, at least the democratic republic I have in mind, is governed not by princes but by representatives of the people, so nature is not governed by gods, but only by natural forces, natural laws, and natural elements or beings.” To posit the existence of God, an immaterial being, “breaks off this necessary connection” between physical things, between the physical senses and the physical objects they perceive. “Calvin says explicitly that God in the Old Testament created light before the sun, in order that men might see that the beneficent effects of light were not necessarily connected with the sun, that even without the sun God is capable of doing what He now, in the customary but by no means necessary course of nature, does by means of the sun.” But “if there is a God, why the world, why nature,” a being that cannot achieve the perfection of God? “It has often been said that the world is inexplicable without a God; but the exact opposite is true: if there is a God, the existence of a world becomes inexplicable; for then the world is utterly superfluous,” as “nothing follows from God; everything beside Him is superfluous, futile, meaningless.” Biblical religion is nihilism, its claim of something coming out of nothing utterly irrational not only in terms of efficient and material causation but in terms of teleological causation, since there is no rational purpose for a perfect Being to create an imperfect thing. Moslem theologians are more rigorously rational than their Christian counterparts, maintaining “quite correctly from the standpoint of theology” that all things are entirely dependent upon God’s will, that there is no nature that acts in any way independently of God. Fire could cool things, if God willed that. ‘Christian rationalism’ of the sort propounded by Aquinas is only “theism attenuated by atheism or naturalism or cosmism, in short, by elements opposed to theism”—a “limited, restricted, and incomplete atheism or naturalism.” A God “who acts only in accordance with natural laws” is “a God only in name.” “Only an unlimited, wonder-working God, bound by no laws, a God who, at least in man’s faith and imagination, can save us from all trouble and affliction, is truly a God,” but a God “who is no more powerful than doctors and medicines, is an utterly superfluous, unnecessary God,” an “absurdity.” The choice is stark: no monarchy or absolute monarchy, no God and “an absolute God like the God of our fathers.” Make up your minds, young Germans.

To think straight, “man starts from what is closest to him, from the present, and draws from it inferences concerning what is further away; this procedure is common to atheist and theist alike.” The difference is that theists are, paradoxically, anthropocentric, attributing human qualities to an imagined God and (especially in paganism) to a mythicized, ‘personalized’ cosmos, while atheists “takes nature as his starting point and goes on to the study of man” as one instance of the nature of which he is a part. “The atheist puts nature before art. The theist puts art before nature; in his view, nature is a product of God’s art, or, what amounts to the same thing, of divine art.” The theist mistakenly derives “the unconscious from consciousness, rather than consciousness from the unconscious.” But the mind is no disembodied spirit breathed into man by a disembodied God; the mind is an effect of brain activity. The German mystic Jacob Böhme tried to get around this by claiming that God is corporeal, working himself up into spirituality. This “supernatural naturalism” deifies matter and is merely a product of Bōhme’s fertile, or perhaps febrile, imagination. The claim lacks any evidence, not even Scriptural evidence. “Either God or nature! There is no third, middle term combining the two.” Luckily, “for all his extravagant faith, man is unable to repress or relinquish his natural human reason,” which enables him to pursue “independent activity, diligence, education, self-mastery, and effort”—all needed, since “nature throws man upon his own resources; it does not help him unless he helps himself; it lets him sink if he cannot swim,” as part of nature, which changes perpetually, discarding one aspect of itself in favor of another, then discarding that one. Feuerbach slashes at God with Ockham’s razor: “If there is an eye watching over me, why do I need an eye of my own, why should I look out for myself?” On the grounds of religious passivity, even a man who shaves his own beard rebels against the course of nature, God’s creation. 

As for that creation, Feuerbach dismisses creatio ex nihilo as “a mere evasion”: “Where did the spirit get the nonspiritual, material corporeal substances of which the world consists?” And if, with Hegel, one claims that “He created it out of Himself, out of spiritual matter,” “how does real matter issue from spiritual matter, from God?” “What makes the world world, what makes body body and matter matter, is something that cannot be theologically or philosophically deduced from anything else; it cannot be derived, but simply is, and can be understood only in terms of itself.” Religion is the realm of imagination, of poetry, of man making gods for himself to worship. “I should merely like man to stop setting his hear on things which are no longer in keeping with his nature and needs, and which he therefore can believe and worship only by coming into conflict with himself” as a rational being. Being a thing of the imagination, a thing of poetry, of making, religion permits a morality of man’s own making. “Russian prostitutes are…full of reverence for the saints. When they receive visitors, the first thing they do is to cover their icons and put out the candles.” No less ridiculously, in Feuerbach’s estimation, a Christian “need only hang the cloak of Christian love, of divine grace, over God’s punitive justice and proceed to do anything he pleases.” More comprehensively, man’s imagination, “molded by his nature,” makes God “in his image” and remakes nature, too, “into an image of man.” The imagination enables men to behave as despots over all. Only reason can discern the natural limits of man, who in reality lives within a cosmos that is “blind and deaf to the desires and complaints of man.” Not only does man not need religion for obtaining happiness, religion impedes his pursuit of it. But “as soon as man opens his eyes, as soon as he ceases to be beclouded by religious ideas and sees reality for what it is, his heart revolts against the notion of Providence…by the way in which it saves one man and lets another go to his doom, destines one man to happiness and prosperity and others to abject misery.” Only Enlightened materialism truly promises justice.

While “religion arises solely in the night of ignorance,” a night in which dreams, products of the imagination, rule human minds, it “also springs from man’s need of light, of culture, or at least of the products of culture,” being “the first, still crude and vulgar form of human culture.” This “why every epoch, every important stage in the history of human civilization, begins with religion.” It must not end there, however, since “religion merely suppresses the symptoms of evil, not its causes.” The “radical cure” of “bestiality and barbarism” comes “only where the actions of mankind flow from causes inherent in the nature of man,” in “harmony between principle and practice, cause and effect; only then can man be complete and whole.” The union of principle or theory and practice may be seen in modern science, which may be undertaken by the right kind of education. “All history down to our own times demonstrates that the greatest horrors are compatible with religion, but not with education,” an asseveration that begs the reply, ‘Just you wait!’ Be this as it may, Feuerbach points to the supposed impossibility of “progress” within the horizons of traditional religions. “A new era also requires a new view of the first elements and foundations of human existence; it requires—if we wish to retain the word—a new religion!” To establish this new religion, the old ones must be extirpated; mere religious toleration is not enough. In this new religion, work will replace prayer. Whereas “a Christian’s wishes exceed the limits of nature and of the world,” atheism “is a complete and thoroughgoing rationalism,” one that refuses the illusory promise of immortality the old religions offer, the appeal to wishful thinking, replacing it with the reality of the true God, the “unity and equality of the human race,” of which the false God of the religions is only the “personified” disembodiment. “Those human desires that are not imaginary and fantastic are fulfilled in the course of history, of the future,” desires that “will someday be fulfilled,” will “one day be reality.” “We must therefore modify our goals and exchange divinity, in which only man’s groundless and gratuitous desires are fulfilled, for the human race or human nature, religion for education, the hereafter in heaven for the hereafter on earth, that is, the historical future, the future of mankind.” And just as the old religions insist on a public presence, so should the new ‘religion of humanity.’ “The atheism that fears the light is an unworthy and hollow atheism,” the atheism or privately held, esoteric zeteticism of the old philosophers. “True atheism, the atheism that does not shun the light,” does not merely deny the existence of God but affirms “man’s true being.” True atheism is “liberal, openhanded, openminded,” joyful, life-affirming. “We must replace the love of God by the love of man as the only true religion,” its task being “to transform friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers, devotees of prayer into devotees of work, candidates for the hereafter into students of this world, Christians, who, by their own profession and admission, are half animal, half angel, into men, into whole men.” 

And who shall be the evangelists of the religion of humanity? “I am not for eliminating the cultural aristocracy. Far from it.” You, my university students, can become the vanguard of human progress. The new aristocrats will be aristocrats of the intellect, but deploying intellect in a way that departs in some measure even from previous ‘moderns.’

To do so, they will need not only to reject religion as it has been, not only to plan the religion of the future, but to become the philosophers of the future. His Principles of the Philosophy of the Future provides the roadmap to this new way of life. The “task” of the philosophy of the future is to lead philosophy “from the realm of ‘departed souls’ back into the realm of embodied and living souls; of pulling philosophy down from the divine, self-sufficient bliss in the realm of ideas into human misery,” the “mud in which [man on earth] has been embedded.” That is, Platonic and even Hegelian philosophy (“the philosophy of the absolute”) levitate above human misery instead of helping to remedy it. In this, Feuerbach is not far from Marx’s preference for changing the world instead of attempting to understand it, and he regards the first task of the philosophy of the present, prelude to the philosophy of the future, to provide a “critique of human philosophy through the critique of divine philosophy”—a foreshadowing of the ‘critical thinking’ of Marx and his successors to this day.

The book consists of 65 numbered sections. The central, thirty-third section bears the number traditionally symbolizing Jesus Christ, Who is said to have died at age thirty-three. And the first step toward the philosophy of the future, according to Feuerbach, was taken by Christians, the Protestants who provided a “religious anthropology,” discoursing not so much on God ‘in himself’ but “what he is for man.” Philosophers took the next step, denying that God ‘in himself’ exists, instead claiming that God is “the essence of reason itself.” “That which is object in theism” became in philosophic hands the “subject in speculative philosophy,” with God now the “thinking ego” of man.” Feuerbach charges that “ordinary theology” presents a “self-contradictory” God, one who is human in all his thoughts and feelings yet “supposed to be a non-human and superhuman being,” an “abstracted being”—that is, a being human beings have abstracted from their own distinctive characteristics. The men Feuerbach calls “speculative” philosophers—Descartes and Leibniz, eventually followed by Hegel—rejected God as ” a being of fantasy, a far-removed, indefinite, and cloudy being,” making Him (really It) “a present and definite being,” not a holy but an absolute spirit. “Absolute idealism is nothing but the realized divine mind of Leibnizian theism; it is pure mind systematically elaborated,” as for example in Hegel’s Logic, wherein “the objects of thought are not distinguished from the essence of thought” because the Absolute Spirit is immanent in all of being; Hegelianism is a new form of pantheism, first proposed in modern philosophy by Spinoza. Feuerbach contends that pantheism is in fact “the naked truth of theism” because the things God created, according to the Bible, must have existed in God’s mind before he created them, so the mind of God does indeed comprise all things. That is, if God made matter, “how, why, and from what” did he make it” “To this, theism gives no answer” apart from mere fictions. Only pantheism gives a rationally consistent answer, if one remains within a theological framework.

It only remains for Feuerbach to reject that framework. In Hegelianism, modern science studies the material manifestations of the Absolute Spirit. “But if we were once to have no more objects and no world apart from God, so would we also have no more God—not only an ideal and imagine, but a real being—apart from this world”—a point, it should be said, that Spinoza and the rabbis who attacked him understood very well. “Pantheism connects…atheism with theism, the negation of God with God; God is a material or, in the language of Spinoza, an extended being.” “Matter is not God; it is, rather, the finite, the nondivine, the negation of God,” and pantheism amounts to “theological atheism or theological materialism.” Pantheism is “nothing other than the essence of the modern era elevated to a divine being and to a religiophilosophic principle.” 

Feuerbach dissents from pantheism on ‘Ockhamite’ grounds: If you say God is immanent in matter, why study God at all? You only need to study matter. Medieval scholars were poor scientists because they “had no interest in nature.” ‘We moderns’ no longer know much about God, devils, and angels because “mankind in the modern era lost the organism for the supernatural world and its secrets,” having lost “the disposition toward the supernatural world.” That is, knowledge follows not the head, not reason, but the heart. They were led to his heart-change by Spinoza, “the Moses of modern freethinkers and materialists”—a thought suggesting that Feuerbach conceives of himself as the Christ of such men. Spinoza has done the preliminary work of negating theoretical theology; Baconian empiricism negates practical theology by marking out experience, including experimental science, as a realm of ‘not-God.’ But empiricism by itself is sub-philosophical; modern philosophy must elevate it to theoretical status, and that is where Feuerbach comes in.

“Matter is an essential object of reason,” inasmuch as “if there were not matter, reason would have no stimulus and substance for thinking and thus no content.” In a sense, “God exists,” for moderns, but only as “a tabula rasa, an empty being, a mere idea,” a manifestation of “our ego, our mind, and our essence.” “Modern philosophy proceeded from theology; it is indeed nothing other than theology dissolved and transformed into philosophy,” from Descartes to Hegel. “The culmination of modern philosophy is the Hegelian philosophy,” a “pantheistic idealism.” This idealism must be purged from philosophy altogether by the philosophers of the future, following the lead of Feuerbach. “The historical necessity and justification of modern philosophy attaches itself…mainly to the critique of Hegel.”

The problem with Hegel: his Absolute Spirit, unfolding dialectically in time, amounts to God’s “self-liberation from matter,” albeit strictly within the human mind. Some of the previous philosophers had taught that philosophers, and philosophers alone, liberate themselves from matter, that this “self-liberation [is] the virtue of a human being,” but they didn’t posit anything like the Absolute Spirit, and so did not embrace historicism, the notion that all events up to Hegel’s metaphysics were ‘relative to’ and propaedeutic of the ‘end of History,’ the culmination of this eons-long process. In Hegel’s theory, “God is God only because he overcomes and negates matter,” which is the negation of God. “Only the negation of [this] negation is the true affirmation,” but as far as Feuerbach is concerned this returns us to “the point from which we started—in the bosom of God.” “The secret of the Hegelian dialectic lies, in the last analysis, only in the fact that it negates theology by philosophy and then, in turn, negates philosophy by theology,” resulting in “a self-contradictory, atheistic God.” This isn’t quite fair to Hegel, for whom God or the Absolute Spirit is not a ‘he’ but an ‘it’; it would be better to complain that this returns us to a sort of neo-Platonism, a triumph of mental force over brute matter—the victory of a form of energy over matter. [2] At any rate, Feuerbach alleges that the “speculative identity of mind and matter” seen in Hegel is “nothing more than the unfortunate contradiction of the modern era,” which cannot quite relinquish the divine. “Just as the divine essence is nothing other than the essence of man liberated from the limits of nature, so is the essence of absolute idealism nothing other than the essence of subjective idealism liberated from its limits, and, indeed, rational limits, of subjectivity, that is, from sensation or objectivity in general.” ‘Absolute’ theology, seen not only in Hegel but in such non- or pre-historicist idealists as Kant and Fichte, mistakenly attempts to ‘objectify’ the goings-on in the brain, thereby alienating man “from his own essence and activity.”

Such philosophers quite literally talk “nonsense”—non-sense—by rejecting the evidence of the senses or rather attempting to overcome sense-impressions with ideational illusions of various sorts. “The proof that something is has no other meaning that something is not only thought of.” Anything that is only thought of doesn’t really exist. Concretely, if “I have one hundred dollars only in the mind, but the other dollars in the hand,” the dollars in my mind “exist just for me” but the dollars in my hand “also exist for others” because “they can be felt and seen.” Feuerbach derives the thought of right from what would seem the unpromising soil of materialism by arguing that if I am merely an idea in the head of someone else, “I must put up with everything.” Other persons could “portray me in a way that would be a true caricature without my being able to protest against it,” whereas “when I am still really existing, then I can thwart him, then I can make him feel and prove to him that there is a vast difference between me as I am in his conception and me as I am in reality, namely, between me as his object and me as a subject.” As an abstraction, I am only “a being made up and invented, without the essence of being,” but as a material, sensually perceived object, “I am a liberal,” a man free of anyone else’s imagining and conceptualizing. To think ‘abstractly’ is to lose all sense of reality, of limits. Materialism is of the earth, earthy, and that is a very good thing because without limits “we would arrive at the negation of all rights, for rights are founded only on the reality of the difference between this and that,” difference sensually perceived. A real philosopher, a follower of the “new philosophy” of Feuerbach, sets material, sensually perceived limits on his thinking. “The reality of the idea is…sensation. But reality is the truth of the idea; thus, sensation is the truth of the idea”; “truth, reality, and sensation are identical.”

In the thirty-third, central section of the book, Feuerbach rejects the spiritualized love of Platonism, philosophic eros (what Marx would soon deride as “a passion of the head”) and the spiritual love of Christianity, caritas or agape. “Love is passion,” material passion, “and only passion is the hallmark of existence.” The lover distinguishes, sensually, this from that, who or what he loves from those persons or things he does not love. That is, the core of Feuerbach’s teaching makes the senses do the work of what rationalist philosophers and religious men had bestowed upon reasoning, with its eros for the truth, and/or divine inspiration, with its transformational and creative spiritual love, the love of a holy God, a God separate from His creation. It is “in feelings,” not in thoughts, that “the deepest and highest truths are concealed,” since “love is the true ontological proof of the existence of an object apart from our mind. “That object whose being affords you pleasure and whose nonbeing affords you pain—that alone exists.” “The new philosophy itself is basically nothing other than the essence of feeling elevated to consciousness; it only affirms in reason and with reason what every man—the real man—professes in his heart,” which “does not want abstract, metaphysical, or theological objects” but “real and sensuous objects and beings.” This is indeed a philosophy well designed to attract young men stuck in a university classroom.

“The secret of immediate knowledge is sensation.” This is Feuerbach’s version of Locke’s “self-evident truths,” rejected by the previous German Romantics and by subsequent German philosophers (Nietzsche, Heidegger) as English, all-too-English. But Feuerbach regards the English philosopher is the true philosopher of liberty.

Feuerbach nonetheless does not reject ideas as illusory, if they are rightly understood. If so understood, ideas are “refined” sense perceptions, as distinguished from “the vulgar and crude senses or through the eyes of the anatomists or chemists.” Such refinement comes about when we see that we cannot by ourselves distinguish between genuine sense impressions and illusions. “Only through communication and conversation between man and man do ideas arise. Not alone, but only with others, does one reach notions and reason in general” because “that which I alone perceive I doubt,” whereas “only that which the other also perceives is certain.” This doesn’t mean that truth is socially constructed, as some later thinkers will claim, but rather than it is socially confirmed. Genuine, “objective” ideas are those that are “acknowledged by another person apart from you for whom they are an object.” It is not clear why illusions might not also be shared, as they surely can be, and indeed as they must have been, up to this point, according to Feuerbach himself. At best, the requirement of ‘intersubjectivity’ might disqualify such ideas as cannot be shared; it cannot verify such ideas that can be shared and more, believed.

“Only now, in the modern era, has mankind arrived again—as once in Greece after the demise of the Oriental dream world—at the sensuous, that is, the unfalsified and objective perception of the sensuous, that is, of the real.” Contra the sham-modern Hegel, “not only is space not the negation of reason, it provides place for reason and the idea; space is the first sphere of reason,” since where there is no spatial being apart, there is also no logical being apart.” The distinction between one thing and another can only be perceived sensually if space exists between them. Logic, whether classical or Hegelian, collapses without it. This demonstrates that “the laws of reality are also the laws of thought,” not in the Hegelian sense but in the strictly material sense brought to us by the senses. Whereas Hegel supposes that contradictions are overcome by his ‘X plus not-X = X combined, ‘synthesized,’ with not-X, sensual perception enables time to unite such “opposing and contradicting determinations” by identifying the material reality underlying them, as when white paint and black paint combine to make grey paint, or when a human being can feel happy, then sad, form one intention, then the opposite one. 

“The new philosophy has…as its principle of cognition and as its subject, not the ego, the absolute, abstract mind, in short, not reason for itself alone, but the real and whole being of man,” who is not the measure of all things, which exist independently of him, but is instead “the measure of reason.” This leads Feuerbach to anticipate a bit of Nietzsche: “Do not think as a thinker, that is, with a faculty torn from the totality of the real human being and isolated for itself,” but “think as a living and real being, as one exposed to the vivifying and refreshing waves of the world’s ocean.” Only if you “think in existence, in the world as a member of it, not in the vacuum of abstraction as a solitary monad, as an absolute monarch, as an indifferent, superworldly God” can “you be sure that your ideas are unities of being and thought.” In another play on Christianity, Feuerbach affirms that “only the truth that became flesh and blood is the truth.” The difference between man and an animal is that human sense perceptions (rather than illusory ideals, which exist only in the mind) are generalizable, universalizable, even as the religious doctrines of Christianity are said, falsely, to be. Animals care only for smells that serve them as particular beings—things that they can eat or dangerous things they must avoid. Man’s sense of smell is ” a sense embracing all kinds of smell; hence it is a freer sense, a sense that can be elevated “to intellectual and scientific acts.” Human senses perceive not only other men but man as such. “Even in thinking and in being a philosopher, I am a man among men,” engaging in “a dialectic between I and thou.” As a result, Feuerbach shuns the “double truth,” the claims of philosophy on the one hand, religion on the other. The new philosophy unifies both in “the philosophy of man,” “tak[ing] the place of religion because it “has the essence of religion within itself.”

The problem with Feuerbach’s vigorously argued materialism is that it begins with the assertion that sense perceptions are all human beings have to begin with, then excludes all other mental phenomena that might not derive from sense perceptions. If human beings had no sense perceptions, would they have no thoughts? Not necessarily. They might be thinkers thinking themselves. This suggests that those who maintain that philosophy cannot refute religion any more than religion can refute philosophy have a point. By closing the minds of young Germans to God, Feuerbach left intelligent but politically inexperienced persons without firm guidance. This ended badly.

 

Notes

1. On the religion of humanity, see “Manent on the Religion of Humanity” on this cite under the category, “Bible Notes.”
2. “To the neo-Platonic philosophers…matter—namely, the material and real world in general—is no longer an authority and a reality. Fatherland, family, worldly ties, and good in general, which the ancient peripatetic philosophy still counted as man’s bliss—all these are nothing for the neo-Platonic sage,” who is no longer capable of distinguishing imagination from perception. “That which is imagination and fantasy with the Neo-Platonists was merely rationalized and transformed by Hegel into concepts.” To Neo-Platonists, God is beyond being, beyond mind, beyond any determination; their imitatio Dei is an ecstasy or rapture; their God is in reality the objectification of this psychological state.” For them, “real man became also a mere abstraction without flesh and blood, an allegorical figure of the divine being. Plotinus, at least according to the report of his biographer, was ashamed to have a body.”

 

 

 

Thomas Aquinas: On the Teacher, Disputed Questions on Truth. Question 11, Articles 3 and 4 of Questiones Disputatae de Veritate. Ralph McInerny translation. London: Penguin, 1998.

 

Why raise the question of whether angels can teach? Augustine never mentions them in his dialogue on teaching. Why does Aquinas do so?

Unlike Augustine, Aquinas aspires to produce not only a comprehensive account of the creator-God and His creation, insofar as that is humanly possible, but a systematic account. Augustine is capable of writing a treatise (as André Malraux remarked, his Confessions end with a treatise on metaphysics), but he is no systematizer. Augustine is a ‘personalist’ avant la lettre. Aquinas seldom writes about himself or other particular human persons; his Disputations are disputes between arguments alone, impersonal, centered on logic with no concern for portraying human beings in dialogue with one another. When a commentator writes, “the objector argues….” he exercises poetic license.

But Aquinas is nonetheless supremely interested in the nature, the ‘species characteristics,’ of persons—the nature of human beings as such, the ‘nature’ of God as the Person sui generis, and the nature of angels, persons whose nature rests in between human nature and God. Further, angelic nature has a characteristic that is of considerable interest for teaching, discovery, and learning: angels are incorporeal by nature, purely intellectual creatures, with no knowledge that is derived from the senses—that is, both free of all physical characteristics and created, not creators. They can “assume” bodies, when that assists human beings, but they do not have them by nature. As incorporeal beings, they have no sensual knowledge of things; “they first and principally understand immaterial things.” They understand those things actually, not as we do, potentially. “The intellectual power of the angels extends to understanding all things: because the object of the intellectual is universal being or universal truth.” Unlike human beings, who must ‘get at’ universal being through sense perceptions of material things, ‘abstracting’ the universals from those particulars, laboriously reasoning toward noetic perception, angels receive knowledge of the species, forms, ideas directly from God, knowledge of events from God’s revelation. Thus, they are not gods; their intellects know because God endowed them with knowledge of the forms when He created them. God, by contrast, doesn’t receive knowledge from anyone or anything. He already knows all, by His “essence,” not having been created, caused by some prior being or beings.

Angels have self-knowledge and they know God. They know material things because they know the forms, the ideas of those things. But “the difference between heavenly and earthly bodies is this, that earthly bodies obtain their last perfection by change and movement: while heavenly bodies have their last perfection at once from their very nature.” Human beings discover and learn things they do not know; angels already know. Accordingly, in the Summa Theologica Aquinas devotes the first 49 questions to God, with the subsequent fifteen questions, devoted to angels. Although free of corporeal limitations, their intellects perfect, needing no teaching, they cannot fully comprehend the essence of God because they are still created intellects. “Nature does not transcend its limits”—an aphorism that expresses both the Aristotelianism and the Christianity of Aquinas. 

In the Summa‘s “Treatise on Angels,” Aquinas goes on to say that “all cognition takes place through an assimilation of the knower to the known” via the form, the idea, of the thing known. “Man knows things which he has not made only by means of forms received from things. The case is different with angels, however, because they have the forms of things given them from the moment of their creation.” Angels have “Morning Knowledge”—knowledge of the primordial being of things as spoken by the Word of God “in the Beginning.” They also have “Evening Knowledge”—knowledge of the being of the things created, as created being and the beings within it stand in their own nature, their forms or ideas, knowledge of all God created by the end of His sixth “day” of creation. They do not, however, know the future, nor do they know the will of man, which is free. God, being eternal, comprehends all the events of time at once, essentially.

So, although angels don’t know as much as God knows, they know a lot, more than we do. But can they teach any of that to us? This is the question Aquinas raises in the third Article of the Disputatio “On the Teacher.” What, if any, educational worth have angels? They are the second most important beings, the most important created beings, and the Bible shows them in their proper role as messengers between God and men, but can they teach us ‘in their own right’? 

Aquinas lists seventeen objections to any such claim. First, as he has stated in the first two Articles of Question 11, human beings can be taught “either inwardly or outwardly.” God alone teaches inwardly; human beings teach outwardly. If angels could teach us, the objector now argues, they would need to use “sensible signs” to do so, as human teachers do. But angels are not material beings, so if they did use “such signs,” they would need to perform a miracle, to appear before our senses, “which is outside the common course” of events—a miracle, “as it were.” In response to this, Aquinas locates angels midway between God and man, saying that they do teach us invisibly and inwardly “by comparison to man’s teaching,” but not as God does, by “infusing light” into the mind. Angelic teaching is therefore “reputed” to be outward. This less-than-illuminating reply might mean that angels teach by means of the imagination, a mode that does indeed lie between intellection and sense perception. But Aquinas has a more complex explanation, involving but not limited to the imagination, as he will show in subsequent answers.

The second objection hones in on the possibility that angels do teach by means of the imagination. “If it be said that the angels teach us in a certain way outwardly, insofar as they make an impression on our imagination,” this cannot be. “Species impressed on the imagination do not suffice for actual imagining, unless an intention be present,” but “an angel cannot induce an intention in us, since intention is an act of will, on which God alone can act.” In Thomistic vocabulary, an intention means a tendency toward something, some end. When we daydream, for example, we do so willingly. An angel cannot make us imagine. Aquinas concurs with the objector’s claim that intentions of the will cannot be forced, as human beings have free will, but “the intention of the sensitive part” of the soul can be forced, as when I feel the pain of a wound, which makes me tend toward tending to it. In this sense, an image presented to us by an angel impresses our senses and thereby impels us toward some end.

The third objection reinforces the claim that angels, although purely intellectual beings themselves, cannot communicate with us, and therefore cannot teach us, in an intellectual way. Only God can “give the natural light,” and only God can give us “the light of grace.” This reprises several objections in the first two Articles, which denied that human beings can teach because they cannot communicate with one another on a purely intellectual plane, with no sensible intermediaries, such as verbal or visual signs. And Aquinas answers similarly: While “the angel infuses neither the light of grace nor the light of nature,” he does “strengthen the light of nature which is divinely infused, as has been said.”

But to teach anything, the objector observes, “it is necessary that the learner see the concept of the teacher,” so that the student’s mind can move towards knowledge. “But a man cannot see the concept of an angel, for he neither sees [those concepts] in themselves, any more than he could those of another man,” if the teacher did not employ signs. Aquinas replies that human beings can be brought to understand the concepts angels have, but not in the same way angels understand them. “Man teaches man as a univocal agent, and in this way passes on to another the knowledge as he himself has it, namely by deducing from causes to the caused.” By “univocal” Aquinas mean a word that always means the same thing. If I say the sky is blue and the crab is blue, I mean the same thing (even if the sky and the crab are different shades of blue). This is why human teachers need to use signs, using words precisely, without equivocation. An equivocal word is a word that means different and indeed unrelated things. If I say ‘square’ in relation to a figure I’ve drawn on the blackboard I mean one thing; if (back in the 1950s) I called you a square, or (back in the 1940s) I praised a square deal, I would mean something entirely different in all three instances. Unlike a human teacher, an angel must teach “like an equivocal agent,” since he needs no reasoning to reach the truth, which is already implanted in him by God, naturally. To convey his knowledge to man, the angel needs to present it in a manner different from the manner in which the angel has it, not intuitively but via imagery or reasoning.

All right, but since “it is the prerogative of him who illumines every man coming in this world to teach” (as in Matthew 23:8) that there is only one Master, one Teacher, Christ, and angels are not Christ, angels are not Christ. This is at best a paradoxical argument, since it clearly states that beings other than Christ can teach. Aquinas addresses it simply by pointing out that Jesus was speaking of the mode of teaching God employs—direct, inward illumination of the intellect—not of teaching generally.

“But only God has causality over the truth, because truth is an intelligible light and a simple form,” produced only by creation.” “Angels are not creators,” and so “cannot teach.” Aquinas answers, easily, that teaching doesn’t cause truth; it “causes knowledge of the truth, in the learner.” And “truth does not depend on our knowledge, but on the existence of things,” which pre-exist our knowledge of them.

The objector accordingly shifts from the object known to the light by which it is known. “An unfailing illumination can only come from an unfailing light because, when the light is taken away, the subject is no longer illumined”; since “science is of the necessary which always is,” it requires “some unfailing light” to illumine it. Since angelic light lasts only so long as God preserves it, it isn’t in principle unfailing and angels cannot teach. Aquinas answers by distinguishing the light by which a thing is illumined from the thing illumined, saying that while science is indeed of the necessary which always is, knowledge of it can fail, and so may the light that illumines it. The teacher or the student may forget what he knew, but that doesn’t change the truth of what he knew.

Returning to the Bible, the objector cites John 1:38, which, according to Jerome’s Gloss, demonstrates that “the merit of faith” consists in “confess[ing] Christ to be a divine person.” Since Christ is the Teacher, only God can teach. Aquinas offers his own Gloss on this passage, not contradicting Jerome but pointing to the context. Initially, some of Christ’s disciples “venerated him as a wise man and teacher,” (rather as Thomas Jefferson did, centuries later), recognizing him as “God teaching” only later on. This means that one can learn from a person who does not seem to you to be God. Aquinas doesn’t the claim that only God can teach; he has already refuted this claim, repeatedly.

This brings Aquinas’ reader to the ninth, central objection. “Whoever teaches must manifest the truth”—which, being “an intelligible light,” is more known to human beings, reasoners, than to angels, who simply intuit it. In this argument, the objector temporarily gives up his acknowledgement of the superiority of angelic knowledge by claiming we know better than they do, since we can not only know the truth but how to get to it when we don’t know it. But Aquinas sees that if angels can intuit the truth, they can intuit the truth about human beings and the way they discover and learn. Therefore, they can teach them in the way humans attain knowledge, either by reasoning with them or “by strengthening the light of intellect” in them. Human beings do not learn from angels in the sense that they somehow become conjoined to them, partaking of their nature. They remain inferior to them in the sense that they do not consist of pure intellect. They can nonetheless be taught by them.

The objector appeals to the authority of Augustine in On the Trinity, where he writes that the human mind is formed by God without any intermediary. Since angels are intermediary creatures, they cannot teach human beings. Aquinas clarifies Augustine’s meaning, which isn’t that human minds are formed by angels but that both human beings and angels know and find their happiness when “conjoined by God.” This does not preclude angelic teaching of their natural inferiors, men.

Recurring to a variation on the second objection, the objector contends that since God forms our will by the infusion of grace, with “no angel mediating,” so he forms our intellect. Aquinas answers in much the same way he did before: The will is not the intellect, and while human will is free, influenced only by divine grace, “both man and angel can, in a certain way, act on intellect, by representing objects by which the intellect is forced” to acknowledge, by logic.

“All teaching is through some species,” the objector remarks. That is, we learn when we know the form, the idea of a thing, as biologists do when they ‘classify’ animals and plants. There are two ways of doing this: either by “creating the species” (one knows what one creates) or by illuminating, ‘shedding light’ on an existing species which exists potentially in the human intellect in the form of a “phantasm”—an image acquired through the external senses, then lodged in the imagination, which is one of the internal senses. Angels don’t create anything, nor can their pure intellects shed light on phantasms for the benefit of the duller, plodding human intellect, which operates by the more ponderous process of reasoning about sense perceptions and phantasms. Aquinas of course agrees that angels are not creators and is willing to go so far as to say that angels cannot illuminate the “phantasms” or images they conceive directly within the human intellect. But they can establish a continuity between the light of their intellects and the light of human intellects by means of those phantasms, which the human mind then perceives through its imagination and can reason about, once they are perceived.

But “there is a greater difference between the intellect of the angel and man’s intellect than between man’s intellect and his imagination.” Since imagination gives us only particular forms, whereas intellect gives us general forms, ideas, there is little communication between the two. “Therefore, much less is the human intellect capable of what is in the angelic mind,” and angels can teach us nothing. On the contrary, Aquinas replies. True, human intellect and human imagination are similar in that they are both characteristics of the human soul, intellect as such, whether human or angelic, is univocal, different in operation but not so absolutely different as to make the knowledge of angels incommunicable to humans. The human mind “can grasp what is in the angelic intellect, in its own way.”

Isn’t the difference in kind between angels and men still too great? Any light by which a thing is illumined “must be proportioned to what is illumined, as bodily light to colors.” But any phantasm produced by an angelic intellect would be purely spiritual, “not proportioned to phantasms which are in a way corporeal,” in the sense that they can be “contained in a bodily organ,” such as the human eye. Aquinas disagrees, saying that “there is nothing to prevent the spiritual from being proportionate” to human sense perception, since in general “nothing prevents the inferior from being acted on by the superior.”

Yet, the difference is still too great, in another way. We know things “either through its essence or its likeness.” Angels cannot teach essences to human beings because that would require them to enter into the human mind, which is impossible for any created being. Aquinas concurs. But he dissents from the objector’s claim that angels cannot teach likenesses to human beings because the angel “causes the likenesses of things in the mind, either by moving the imagination or by strengthening the light of intellect,” as mentioned before.

The objector then observes that a farmer is no creator but a person who “incites nature to natural effects.” By analogy, then, “neither can angels be called teachers and masters.” Aquinas rejects the analogy, inasmuch as teaching isn’t creation but rather the natural ‘incitement’ to a natural effect, namely, the perfection of the intellect. Indeed, as he states later on, “inferior spirits, that is, the human, achieve the perfection of science by the causality of superior spirits, that is, the angels”—angelic intellects being “more actual than the human intellect.”

The final objection in effect responds to Aquinas’ immediately preceding refutation. Angels are superior to man and therefore their teaching “must excel human teaching.” But if angels are only teaching man about “definite causes in nature,” then they aren’t doing anything more excellent than what human teachers do. The problem with this argument is that although angels do indeed teach the same kind of knowledge man can teach man, they know more. And they teach “in a more noble manner,” as well.

Aquinas takes this last point from the Christian Platonist Dionysius the Areopagite in his book On Celestial Hierarchy. Dionysius writes, “I see that the divine mystery of Christ’s humanity was first taught to the angels and then through the grace of knowledge descends to us.” As our superiors in intellect, angels “can do more and more nobly” than we can do, when it comes to teaching; their knowledge is broader and higher than ours, and so is their ability to teach. Aquinas adds Augustine’s observation in On the Good of Perseverance, that there is not only a hierarchy in divine teaching but a certain diversity, inasmuch as (as Aquinas summarizes) “some receive the teaching of salvation immediately from God, some from an angel, some from men.” That is, genuine Christian teaching emanates from God, but God may choose any of those three pathways to convey it. Additionally, while the light of God’s truth enters the human intellect by God’s intention alone, angels and men “can remove an impediment to perceiving the light,” refute errors—an important task teachers perform. 

More generally, “an angel can act on man in two ways”: in the human manner, appearing to our senses visually or auditorily, just as human beings act upon one another; and in the angelic manner, invisibly. How do angels teach men in the angelic manner? 

As mentioned in Augustine’s answer to the twelfth objection in Article 1, intellect differs from bodily sight in that “sense is not a collating power.” The mind’s eye sees self-evident truths the way the eye sees an object, but it also compares, contrasts, thinks logically in order to arrive at truths that are not self-evident, which the intellect sees “only through others already seen,” whether self-evident or rational “habits” established previously by reasoning from the self-evident. Now, “God is the cause of man’s knowledge in the most excellent manner, because he both seals the soul itself with intellectual light and impresses on it knowledge of first principles which are as it were the seeds of the sciences, just as he impresses on natural things the seminal reasons for producing all their effects.” Human beings don’t teach that way, because they can’t; they cannot create their own intellect or implant self-evident truths in it. But they can teach one another “by bringing into actuality what is implicitly and in a certain manner potentially contained in the principles through certain sensible signs shown to exterior sense,” as Augustine and Aquinas agree. 

Located in the natural order between God and man, the angel, whose “intellectual light” is “more perfect than man’s,” can cause human beings to know in both ways, although he cannot do so as well as God can do it. He “cannot infuse intellectual light as God does,” as he is not a creator, but “he can strengthen the infused light for more perfect seeing” better than a human teacher can do, precisely because his intellect is purer, unimpeded by passions. Moreover, “the angel can also teach man, not indeed by conferring on him knowledge of these principles, as God does, nor by the deduction of conclusions from the principles by proposing sensible signs, as a man does, but by fashioning certain forms in the imagination which can be formed by the movement of the bodily organ.” “What the angels know is shown as conjoined with such images,” as Augustine teaches in his commentary on the Book of Genesis. There, Augustine suggests that the account of the six “days” of Creation is an accommodation to the human intellect, which thinks in temporal sequence. The paradox, famously, is that the Genesis account says that God separated light from darkness before creating the sun and stars that emit light. He explains this by arguing that God in fact created light and dark and the heavenly bodies all at once; the angels understand this as one act of God, not as a series of events in time. Their intellects have the power of “conjoining” what human intellects understand in segments.

In his fourth and final Article, Aquinas asks, “Is teaching an act of the active or contemplative life?”—politics or philosophy? The question is roughly analogous to the contrast between human beings and angels, inasmuch as angels, as persons of pure intellect, are better adapted to contemplation than humans are, and they do indeed teach. The question itself is a major theme of Plato’s dialogues. In Christianity, the matter is complicated by the fact that neither God nor the angels (who hold a similar place to that of the guardian daemon Socrates claims to have) take action as well as think. The Biblical God is not pure thought thinking itself and, indeed, is not an ‘it’ at all, but a three-Personed Person). 

The initial set of arguments, which Aquinas will refute, take the classical view of teaching, however, classifying it as an act of the contemplative life. First of all, since (to paraphrase Gregory the Great) “the active life fails when the body does” but “to teach does not fail with the body”—the teacher’s teachings may live on, in his students, after the teacher dies—and since angels teach but have no bodies, teaching goes with the contemplative life. Aquinas remarks that when Gregory writes of the active life, he means not politics but physical labor, “sweaty work,” whereas Dionysius refers to the “hierarchical action in the celestial spirit,” which is obviously “of a higher mode than the active life of which we are teaching.” Gregory also says that action in his sense precedes contemplation, whereas teaching follows contemplation, and therefore “to teach does not pertain to the active life.” But Gregory continues, Aquinas remarks, arguing that the soul can bring “what is drawn from” contemplation to activity, that “when the mind is kindled by the contemplative the active is more perfectly lived.” It all depends, Aquinas writes, on whether the action is indeed sweaty work, which might benefit from prudential reasoning but hardly from contemplation, or for an activity like teaching, which “must follow the contemplative.” In that case, theory precedes practice, but teaching is the practice.

The objector cites Gregory a third time, in remarking that the active life, preoccupied with sweaty work, “sees less” than a teacher does; at the same time, the teacher “sees more” than “one who simply contemplates.” Teaching therefore lies on the contemplative side. Against this, Aquinas concedes that “the vision of the teacher is the beginning of teaching,” and so contemplation precedes teaching, but “the teaching itself consists rather in the transmission of knowledge of the things seen than in the vision of them,” which makes it active. 

Nonetheless, the objector rejoins, just as fire passes the same heat as it progresses, so too does the perfection of the teacher’s mind perfect the mind of the student. Since “to be perfect in himself in the consideration of divine things pertains to the contemplative life,” so does teaching, as does heat from fire. Aquinas regards this argument as proof that “the contemplative life is the principle of teaching,” even as “heat is not the heating but the principle of heating.” Yet while contemplation proposes, teaching disposes; contemplation directs the active, which then acts in accordance with the results of discoveries contemplation reveals. 

For his last attempt, the objector rightly claims that “the active life turns on temporal things” whereas “teaching turns on the eternal, teaching about that which is more excellent and perfect.” But he draws the false conclusion that teaching does not “pertain” to the active life. But of course it does, Aquinas replies, even though one must contemplate before one teaches, just as one must more generally think (whether prudentially or theoretically) before one acts.

In his general remarks, Aquinas begins with a crucial point, quoting Gregory as saying that the active life gives bread to the hungry an teaches “the word of wisdom to those who do not know it,” that just as works of agapic love are works, are actions, so is teaching inasmuch as teaching is among the “spiritual alms.” For the philosophers of classical antiquity, discovery, learning, and teaching are the highest of erotic quests, a “passion of the head,” as Karl Marx (that scholar of things ‘ancient’) put it, albeit in mockery. It is highly unlikely that Plato (for example) expects the Ideas to be brought down to earth. Christian love is another sort of thing. Given the divine power behind divine wisdom, contemplation for Christians is animated by agape or caritas, charity—leading more directly and effectively to action than philosophic contemplation can (or should) do. It is the refusal of ancient philosophers to do that irritates Christians; it is the alleged failure of Christians to do effectively that irritates the moderns, beginning with Machiavelli. 

Aquinas meets Plato and Aristotle partway. Temporal things, the things “on which human acts bear,” pertain to the active life; “the matter of the contemplative,” by contrast, “is the notions of knowable things on which the contemplator dwells.” The active life and the contemplative life differ in their ends, a point that teleological Aristotle would also endorse. But for Aquinas the contemplator dwells not on created things, including nature, so much as “uncreated truth,” the things of God, “to the degree possible for the one contemplating.” Admittedly, human beings at best see uncreated truth imperfectly in this life and must wait for “the future life” to see them “perfectly.” This is why, Aquinas remarks, “Gregory also says that the contemplative life begins here, that it might be perfected in the heavenly fatherland.” Meanwhile, “the end of the active life,” in this life, “is action,” aiming at “usefulness to neighbors.” That is, in Christian terms, God’s love for human beings is active, agapic, man’s love for God erotic, contemplative, man’s love for man agapic, active. God need not contemplate man, since He already knows him; man must contemplate God, because he knows Him imperfectly, regarding Him with philosophic eros, not only with fear but with wonder; man knows another man as he knows himself, and therefore need not so much contemplate him as act to help him. In teaching, this act of man helping man needs contemplation as its background, as the teacher needs to know what he’s talking about. But teaching itself is an interaction (as later writers would say) between teacher and student. Teaching has this “double object,” first of learning by the teacher, contemplation of the topic to be taught, then of transmitting knowledge to the student. “By reason of the first matter, the act of teaching pertains to the contemplative life, but by reason of the second to the active.” Teaching in itself belongs to the active life, “although in a certain way [it] pertains to the contemplative life.”

 

 

 

Thomas Aquinas: On the Teacher, Disputed Question on Truth. Question 11, Articles 1 and 2 of Questiones Disputatae de Veritate. Ralph McInerny translation. London: Penguin Books, 1998.

 

Here, Aquinas replies to Augustine’s dialogue, On the Teacher, presenting the topic in the manner he would perfect in the Summa Theologica: raising questions, articulating answers with which he will disagree, then refuting the arguments supporting those answers—the ‘disputation’ form of Scholastic teaching. This genre retains one characteristic of Platonic dialogues, the dialectical clash of opinions, while removing the personal drama. One need not think of a main character and his interlocutors, the ways in which those persons speak to one another, how they shape their speeches mindful of the characters and political standing of those they are speaking with, and those who are listening. One need only follow the argument.

Within the eleventh Disputatio, “On the Teacher,” Aquinas poses four questions: Can a man teach and be called a master or God alone? Can someone be called his own teacher? Can man be taught by an angel? Is teaching an act of the active or the contemplative life? Of these questions, the one on angels is the only one not addressed by Augustine in his dialogue. Why is it here?

Aquinas lists eighteen reasons for denying that a man can teach, for believing that only God can teach. In Matthew 23, Jesus condemns the scribes and Pharisees, who teach one thing and do another, loving “the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogue, and to have people call them rabbi.” But you, the “crowds and disciples” whom I am teaching, “are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher,” the Messiah, “and you are all students.” That is, the issue is humility: “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.” Jerome’s marginal note to his Latin translation of his passage in the Bible warns against “attribut[ing] to men divine honor” or “usurp[ing] what is God’s.” Aquinas replies to the objection by clarifying “how this prohibition should be understood.” As Jerome’s gloss goes on to say that we are not to call a man ‘master’ in the sense that he plays “the principal role in teaching.” That “belongs to God.” We must not rely on “the wisdom of men” but rather “in what we hear from a man, consulting the divine truth, which speaks in us through the impress of His likeness.” Aquinas, who is teaching would-be teachers, ignores the majority of Jesus’ listeners, the “crowds,” mentioning only the would-be teachers of Jesus’ day, the disciples. In this sense, he is less ‘democratic’ than Jesus. His main point is sound, however. Obviously, Aquinas himself is a teacher, a teacher teaching the next generation of teachers. He does not deny that human beings can teach, only that they are the truest Teacher. Teachers should keep an eye on themselves, since it is easy to ‘master’ students in knowledge.

The second objection directly addresses one of Augustine’s arguments, distorting it. [1] Man teaches through signs because merely acting in answer to a question leaves too much room for ambiguity. In Augustine’s dialogue, if someone asks me what the sign ‘walking’ means, and I get up and walk, he may think walking is getting up, or moving from one place to another, or some other thing. In the vocabulary of Scholasticism, one does not know from observing an action whether the meaning of the action is to be denoted from the “substance” of it (e.g., the act of walking) or “some accident of it” (e.g., walking fast, making haste). Yet, signs are also inadequate “because knowledge of things is more important than knowledge of signs.” Therefore, “no one can pass on knowledge of things to another and thus he cannot teach him.” God is the only teacher because teaching itself is humanly impossible—miraculous, an act of divine intervention. To this, Augustine replies that the knowledge of signs doesn’t give us knowledge of things; as Augustine argues, I learn nothing if I ask what a word means, and you answer with a synonym. I only learn if I tell you what the word means according to its “principle.” If you ask me what a human being is and I say, ‘Man,’ that is unhelpful, but if I say, ‘an animal capable of reason,’ that gets to the principle of the thing. “The knowledge of principles, not knowledge of signs, causes in us knowledge of conclusions.”

The closely related third objection also originates in Augustine’s dialogue. If I propose a sign to designate something, either you know the thing I’m talking about or you don’t. If I say, ‘human being,’ you will only know what I’m talking about if you already know what I’m talking about, not through the word-sign I have used. “If all a man does in teaching is to propose signs, it seems that one man cannot be taught by another man,” at all. To this, Aquinas offers not a refutation but a distinction. “The things of which we are taught by means of signs we indeed know in one respect but do not know in another.” If I try to teach you something about what man is,” you must indeed “know something of him beforehand”—that he is an animal, for example. In a syllogism, to learn a conclusion “we must previously know what the predicate and subject are.” “All learning comes from previously existing knowledge,” as Aristotle says in his Posterior Analytics. 

But what is teaching? It is “nothing other than causing knowledge in another in some way,” as the next objection defines it, and since knowledge is in the intellect, and signs merely strike the senses, they cannot teach. Teachers attempt to teach by the use of signs, and “therefore, a man cannot be taught by a man.” This is congruent with the first objection, which is that only God can teach because only God can communicate with his creature without physical signs but spiritually. No, that isn’t what happens, Aquinas replies. We do indeed receive sensible signs through the “sense power,” initially. But by those physically sensed signs “the intellect receives intelligible intentions, which it uses for bringing about science [knowledge] in itself.” An intelligible intention is rational, free of contradictions; it is one’s reason, “moving discursively from principles to conclusions,” that learns—as argued both in Augustine’s dialogue and Plato’s Meno.

Very well, “if science is caused in one man by another, either the knowledge was in the learner, or it was not.” If it wasn’t in him, it would need to be created out of nothing, as no human being can do. If it was in him, fully, then he has learned nothing; if it was in him potentially, “as a kind of rational seed,” such seeds are “inserted in nature by God alone.” However knowledge comes to be in the human mind, no man put it there. Aquinas concurs with the concept of the rational seed, “naturally put in us.” God creates man, man does not create himself. But this seed is only a seed, not fully “actualized.” What a human teacher can do is to bring it to actuality, nourish it and induce it to grow.

Yet, given that science is an “accident”—a characteristic of a thing that does not alter its “substance,” as, for example, greenness does not alter a leaf’s ‘leafness’—and given that “an accident cannot pass from its subject”—a green leaf does not transfer its greenness to a brown leaf, or vice-versa—and “since teaching seems to be the transfer of the master’s knowledge to the student,” then “one man cannot be taught by another.” But, answers Aquinas, “the teacher does not transfer knowledge into the learner” as a bank might transfer money to another bank. Rather, “through teaching there comes to be in the pupil knowledge similar to that which is in the master, brought forth from potency,” the rational seed, brought “to act,” i.e., to actuality. The rational seed, the potential to know, already exists in the pupil in the form of reason. The teacher causes an attentive student to discover or learn by stimulating that innate capacity.

The objector returns to Scripture, specifically, to Romans 10:17: “Faith comes from hearing.” Jerome’s gloss elaborates, saying that while “an outward herald proclaims” but “God teaches within.” Because “science is caused in the interior of the mind and not outside in the senses,” only God teaches, not men. In answering, Aquinas has recourse to an analogy. A physician acts externally, nature internally; together, they cause health. Similarly, a teacher who teaches truth states the truth outside the mind of the student, while “God teach[es] within,” having implanted the rational seed that actualizes itself when truth is brought to it from outside.

Quoting Augustine in The Teacher, the eighth objection notes that just as a farmer does not make the tree he cultivates, so a man does not make knowledge occur in the student’s mind but only “disposes” the student’s mind for knowledge. Only God can truly make knowledge occur. Aquinas objects to the objection by remarking that Augustine does not “deny that a man teaches from without when he proves that God alone teaches, because God alone teaches within.” The ‘external’ teachings enunciated by human beings have real content, and they do reach inside the human intellect, although God alone has planted the rational seed that enables that content to be understood, known.

The objector then switches to a new metaphor. To teach truth is to illuminate the mind, “since truth is the light of the mind.” But according to John 1:9, John the Baptist, “sent from God,” came in order to “testify about the light, in order that all may believe through him.” John himself “was not the light, but he came in order that he might testify about the light—the light, the true one, who enlightens every man, was coming into the world.” God Himself is the light and therefore the enlightener, not any man, even if that man’s testimony is given him by God. This is another reason why “no man can truly teach another.” But on the contrary, Aquinas insists, John the Baptist was indeed “a true teacher and a teacher of the truth and enlightener of the mind,” not in the sense that he “infus[ed] light to reason,” but as one who “aid[ed] the light of reason to the perfection of science through what he externally proposes.” That is why Paul writes in Ephesians 3:8-9, “Although I am the very least of the saints, this grace was given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things.” 

Very well then, but if a teacher brings a potential knower “to the state of actually knowing” then the potential knower has changed. This changes science or wisdom itself, contradicting Augustine’s observation in his book, Eighty-three Questions, “where he says that when wisdom comes to man, it is the man who changes, not wisdom.” Aquinas asks his reader to consider that there are two kinds of wisdom, created and uncreated. Both kinds of wisdom “are said to be infused in man,” making him “changed for the better.” Uncreated wisdom is unchangeable. In one sense, created wisdom is also unchangeable, existing in God, eternally. Wisdom created in the human intellect is also unchangeable “with respect to the eternal things.” But, in another sense, created wisdom is changeable “according to the existence it has in its subject,” by which Aquinas means that the subject himself “is changed from having it potentially to having it actually.” Wisdom is knowledge of “the intelligible forms; these are “both likenesses of things,” unchangeable, and “forms perfecting the intellect,” agents of change which themselves change in the sense that they have become something they were not before: agents of change. 

But if “science seems to be nothing else than the inscription of things in the soul,” the “assimilation of the knower to the known,” no human being can “inscribe in another’s soul the likenesses of things,” inasmuch as only God can “work within” a human soul.” This makes teaching is impossible. No, Aquinas replies, since “intelligible forms” are already “inscribed in the learner,” and “it is through them the knowledge acquired through teaching is constituted.” God’s work within the human intellect has already been done, at least insofar as human teaching is concerned. “For the teacher proposes signs of intelligible things from which the agent intellect receives intelligible intentions and inscribes them” in an intellect God made capable of receiving them. The intellect has no difficulty in receiving impressions of things outside of itself—physical objects—so, how much more it can receive impressions formed with intention by another human being. The intellect’s own intentionality makes it receptive to intentions from other persons.

At this point, the objector brings in the authority of Boethius. Admittedly, as the observer paraphrases him, “through teaching the mind is summoned to know, but one who summons the intellect to know does not cause it to know, any more than he who summons another to bodily seeing causes him to see.” Plato’s Socrates does this, as does Augustine in On the Teacher. This criticism requires a more elaborate reply than any other. Aquinas begins by observing that “intellect and bodily sight are not wholly alike”; the objects we see are visible as soon as we direct our eyes toward them; we need no one outside ourselves to “incite” us in order to see, except when someone points something out to the person who isn’t looking at it. (Or, it might be added, if some other sense prompts the eyes to look, as when a sound attracts attention.) But the act of seeing itself needs no intermediaries.  This is true of ‘the mind’s eye’ with regard to self-evident truths, but self-evident truths may lead the intellect to wonder about things that are not self-evident, things that it “cannot understand save through the office of reason by explicating.” To understand those things, the intellect “needs a mover which actualizes it by way of teaching.” “The teacher stirs the intellect to knowing what he teaches, as an essential mover brings actuality from potency.” To show something to someone by bodily sight is only an accidental cause of the knowledge of the one directed to look; the looker sees without any further assistance. Self-evident truths known to the intellect operate the same way, but knowledge founded on those truths may require guidance from outside the student’s mind, in the form of an argument, a set of deductions based upon the self-evident truths. Aquinas takes the ideas of essential and accidental causes, actuality and potentiality, from Aristotle’s Physics Book 8, in which Aristotle addresses the problem of motion. Motion occurs when an object that has the potential to be moved has that potential actualized by something intrinsic to it and/or something extrinsic to it. Growth is an intrinsic principle of motion; a brick being pried out of the pavement is subject to an extrinsic principle of motion. The teacher is an extrinsic cause of knowledge, but only because the intellect he seeks to instruct has the intrinsic potential to change, to receive and incorporate what he teaches.

The objector persists. If, as Augustine says in The Teacher, knowledge/science differs from opinion or belief in being certain, then this makes teaching impossible. Teachers attempt to teach through the senses of the learner; since “what is in the senses is always oblique to what is in the intellect,” there can be no certainty in what is conveyed through them. Teaching is impossible. Aquinas replies that scientific certainty derives not from the senses but from the principles, as “conclusions are known when they are resolved into the principles” by reason. “The light of reason” has already been “divinely inserted within” the intellect; this is how “God speaks in us.” When a human teacher speaks to us, he does indeed communicate through our senses, but it is reason that resolves what we would now call “sense data” into principles.

If so, if “an intelligible light and species are required for science, but neither can be caused in man by another man” because only God causes them, then “a man would have to create something” in order to teach, which is manifestly impossible for a mere human. Aquinas agrees that “the man teaching externally does not infuse the intelligible light” but although it doesn’t ‘create’ species it does “cause” them to exist in the intellect of others “in some way,” having “propos[ed] to us certain signs of intelligible intentions, which our intellect receives from the signs and stores in itself.”  

The objector reaches for a bit of sophistry in his fifteenth try. “Only God can form the mind of man”; “science is a kind of form of mind”; “therefore, God alone causes science in the soul.” Aquinas bats that away by remarking that while “only God can form the mind, this should be understood of its ultimate form,” not of the “many” other forms that the mind stores within itself. God forms only man’s “rational nature.”

Another dubious effort is the false analogy that follows. Both ignorance and guilt are in the mind. Only God can purge the mind of guilt. Therefore, only God purges the mind of ignorance. Once again, Aquinas pounces. Guilt is in the affection, not in the intellect. Only God can “make an impression” on the affection. But ignorance, which is indeed in the intellect, can be diminished by “a created power,” as previously shown.

Back to the certainty of true knowledge, then. Merely to hear someone speaking hardly causes certainty; if it did, “whatever is said to him by a man would hold certain for him.” Certainty occurs “by hearing the truth speak within,” and since only God can make that happen, a man cannot bring another to certainty. Aquinas is beginning to lose his patience: “As has been remarked,” he emphasizes, “the certainty of science is in God alone, who instils in us the light of reason, through which we know the principles from which the certainty of science derives; yet science is caused in us in some way be man as well, as has been said.”

The objector tries one final time. If I could have given the correct response to a question before it was asked, I could not be said to have learned that response from anything my would-be teacher tells me. Yes, but potentiality isn’t actuality. My teacher doesn’t instill the intellectual principles that enable me to reach a conclusion, but he does lead me to the conclusion itself.

As always, the core of Aquinas’ answer consists first of an interpretation of several authoritative texts, usually the Bible. Two citations from 2 Timothy clearly show that human beings are entitled to teach Scripture, so long as they avoid false doctrine. He also essays an extraordinarily far-fetched argument derived from an image from Augustine’s Against the Manicheans. Before sin, Augustine writes, the earth was watered by a spring, but, after sin, the earth needed “rain descending from the clouds.” Aquinas claims that the earth represents the human mind, “made fruitful by the spring of truth, but after sin needed the teaching of others, like rain descending from the clouds.” This supposedly shows that “at least after sin, a man can be taught by another man.” It might as easily be said that it shows that after sin, a man must be taught by God and/or by angels.

Can a man teach and be called a master, or God alone? Aquinas begins his substantive response by observing that there are three dimensions to the question: 

1. Bringing forms into existence.
2. The acquisition of virtue.
3. The acquisition of knowledge.

He canvasses several opinions that he will refute. Avicenna and others claim that forms, virtues, and knowledge all come to the human mind from “an external agent,” whether it is “a giver of forms,” a “substance perfecting the souls of men,” or an “agent intelligence.” Others make the opposite claim, that forms, virtues, and knowledge are all latent within us, and that a “natural agent does nothing other than to bring them from a hidden to a manifest condition.” This includes the apparent claim of Socrates in the Meno that teaching merely leads the soul to “the remembrance or consideration of what it previously knew.”

Avicenna’s error is to assume that first causes are the only ones, that there are no “proximate causes.” It is one thing to say that God is the first cause of an effect, quite another to say that He doesn’t act through human or angelic agents. But “the first cause out of the eminence of his goodness not only makes things to be but also to be causes.” The Creator-God has so articulated His creation so that parts of it can cause things to happen. The Muslim claim that God causes all things and all events directly ignores this. This goes for teaching, also: The claim that forms, virtues, and knowledge are latent within us, that the proximate causes or lesser agents do nothing but “make the hidden manifest by removing impediments whereby forms and the habits of virtue and the sciences were obscured,” derogates from the importance of those causes and agents.

Aristotle’s “middle way” is more accurate. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle emphasizes the importance of “habit,” a term whose root means “to have,” Aquinas remarks. A habit is a disposition whereby someone is inclined by his acts, to good or bad, in relation to the passions—good and bad defined as the fulfillment or non-fulfillment of human nature, which exists in every person but in large measure only ‘in potential.’ Here, Aquinas extends this understanding of habit to teaching, discovering, and learning. “Natural forms do indeed pre-exist in matter, but not actually,” not in action, as Avicenna says and Plato’s Socrates seems to say, “but only potentially, from which they are brought into act by the proximate external agent, not only the first cause.” The same goes for the virtues, which “pre-exist in us in certain natural inclinations” but must be “brought to their fitting completion” by instruction, example, discipline, and, finally, habituation.  And when it comes to knowledge, “the seeds of the sciences pre-exist in us”; they are “the first conceptions of the intellect which are known right away by the light of the agent intellect through species abstracted from sensible things, whether these be complex, like axioms, or incomplex, like the notions of being and one and the like, which the intellect apprehends straightaway.” The teacher then leads the mind of the student “from this universal knowledge to the actual knowing of particulars.” This contrasts noticeably not only with Avicenna and Plato’s Socrates, but with the later ‘epistemology’ of Locke, for whom knowledge of the particulars comes first, in the form of ‘simple ideas’ or sense perceptions; the intellect ‘constructs’ complex ideas out of the sense perceptions. Exaggerated, Locke’s claim can lead to the impasses of subjectivism, relativism, ‘postmodernism,’ and so on.

Aquinas takes care to observe that natural potentiality can be either “complete active potency, namely, when an intrinsic principle is sufficient to bring about a perfect act” (e.g., healing) or “passive potency,” when the intrinsic principle does not so suffice (e.g., fire, which needs air). This is not always a sharp dichotomy. The body can heal itself, possessing complete active potency, but the physician’s art works with the body’s nature, his medicines hastening the natural healing; this is still an example of active potency because the physician “ministers to” the body.

Teaching can actualize both kinds of potential. In the case of complete active potency, the teacher (or other “extrinsic agent”) supplies the “intrinsic agent” with whatever it needs to “come forth to actuality” (e.g., the physician who prescribes a medicine that helps the wound to heal). A student may acquire “knowledge of the unknown” by way of discovery, yet that discovery may be guided by the teacher who assigns a book to read. In the case of passive potency, the extrinsic agent really takes the lead (“this way is called learning“), as when the teacher lectures, or when he shows the student exactly how to make bread. The first instance is knowledge by nature, the second knowledge by art.

“The process of coming to knowledge of the unknown by discovery is to apply the common self-evident principles to determinate matters and then to proceed to particular conclusions, and from those to others.” The teacher “show[s] signs” to the student “so that the natural reason of the pupil, through what is proposed, as through certain instruments, comes to the knowledge of the unknown.” Aquinas cites Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics: “demonstration is a syllogism that causes one to know.” This is very different from telling someone something that is not based upon self-evident principles, a process that “will not cause knowledge, but perhaps opinion or belief,” which may be true or false. Because “the light of reason by which” self-evident principles “are known is placed in us by God,” and “all human teaching is only efficacious because of the power of this light, it follows that it is God alone who teaches within and principally, just as nature principally and within heals.” Human beings teach in proximate or secondary ways—an important function, because they can lead or mislead.

The second question Aquinas raises—Can someone be called his own teacher?—has an important implication. If no one can be self-taught, then what is taught would be comprehensive, leaving no possibility of discovery or innovation, no possibility of philosophizing. The objector presents six reasons for affirming that a human being can indeed teach himself.

First, because “the principal cause of the science caused in us is the agent intellect,” which is “more of a teacher than the man outside” who is only “an instrumental cause.” To this, Aquinas answers that although the agent is a more principal cause than the teacher “in a certain respect,” science or knowledge “does not exist completely” in the agent intellect, as it does in the teacher. Insofar as he teaches truth, insofar as he really knows his stuff, his knowledge is perfect, superior to the knowledge of the learner. Second, the objector argues that learning entails “certainty of knowledge,” which occurs “in us through principles naturally known in the light of the agent intellect,” not via instruction from outside that intellect. Aquinas simply refers the objector to his answer to the first objection, which equally refutes the second one.

Third, citing Matthew 23:8, the objector recalls that there is only one true teacher, God, who “teaches us insofar as he gives us the light of reason by which we judge all things.” That light, not the light brought by a human teacher, brings us knowledge. Aquinas replies that although the student may indeed be “more equipped to know” than his teacher (Aquinas himself being a notable example), the teacher’s knowledge is more perfect. And while the brilliant student may discover a science on his own, the teacher, “who explicitly knows the whole science, can lead us to science more expeditiously than anyone can be brought to it on his own because he foreknows the principles of the science in some generality.”

The objector then cites Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, who teaches that “to know something by way of discovery is more perfect than to learn from another”; does this not imply that self-teaching ranks much higher than any teaching from without? The same goes for virtue, as “those who come to the works of virtue without an external instructor or legislator are said to be a law unto themselves.” The objector cites Romans 2:14, the middle verse in the passage where the Apostle Paul says, “For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but the doers of the law who will be justified. When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires these though not having the law, are a law to themselves. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them on the day when, according to my gospel, God, through Jesus Christ, will judge the secret thought of all.” Aquinas replies that what law is to practice, principle is to theory. To know the law is not necessarily to ‘have’ it in the fullest sense, to act according to it, to have it as a habit. Similarly, to know the fundamental principles, such as the principle of non-contradiction, to possess the capacity to reason, is not to think rationally on all matters. That is what a teacher can stir one to do. 

Finally, since proverbially “the physician heals himself,” one can teach himself. Jesus cites this saying in Luke 4. There, described as having been “full of the Holy Spirit,” Jesus is tempted by the devil for forty days in the wilderness, challenged to prove that He is the Son of God. Jesus refuses, commanding, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” Returning to Galilee, he teaches in the synagogues, “praised by all,” but upon teaching at the synagogue in his home, Nazareth, he read from Isaiah 61, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” anointing me “to bring good news to the poor,” to “proclaim release to the captives,” to “bring sight to the blind,” to “let the oppressed go free,” and to “proclaim the year of the Lord’ favor.” This day is the day of the Messiah, and Jesus announces that “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Knowing, or supposing that they know, that Jesus is merely the son of Joseph, not of God, the Nazarenes are indignant. This is when Jesus says, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Physician, cure yourself!'” That is, if you are who you say you are, prove it by performing miracles—exactly the same temptation the devil had essayed. If you cannot, then you are lying, mad, demon-infested. To which Jesus calmly continues, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown,” proceeding to enrage the congregation further in citing the story of the prophets Elijah and Elisha, miracle-workers, thereby implying that He is Elijah. The Nazarenes drive him out of town, intending not to tempt him to jump off a cliff but to throw him off one, in vain. They have proved unteachable, even by the supreme Teacher. A raging soul is unteachable, as is its opposite, the soul which takes nothing seriously, jesting Pilate. The context of the phrase the objector cites itself indicates the error, indeed the serious fault, behind the phrase.

But Aquinas explains the matter in terms of a rational distinction rather than in terms of narrative implication. Yes, the physician heals “insofar as he has health, not actually, but in the knowledge of art.” Thus, he really can heal himself, even when his own body is unhealthy. by applying the knowledge of his art to himself. But the teacher teaches “insofar as he actually has science.” He conveys that science/knowledge to the student by his signs, in contradistinction to the physician, who does not convey his own health to his patient by his art. The physician is part of a process of active potency, while the teacher, in bringing the student to learn, is part of a process of passive potency. Put simply, “the teacher must have knowledge where the learner does not”; “therefore, no one can teach himself or be called his own teacher” insofar as he is a learner and not a discoverer.

For “it should be said without any doubt that one can, through the light of natural reason placed within him and without any external aid, come to the knowledge of many unknown things, as is evident in all who acquired science by way of discovery.” Aristotle is right, as far as that goes, and of course the Apostle Paul and Jesus are also right; by nature, innately, one may know come to know many things and physicians can indeed heal themselves. Aquinas identifies two “agent principles” in natural things, as per Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The first is the “perfect agent,” which “has within itself everything that it causes in the effect.” The other is what might be termed a contributing or partial cause, necessary but not sufficient to effect something. “In the primary agents there is action in the fullest sense, but not in agents of the secondary sort, because a thing acts insofar as it is actual.” A secondary agent is not a “perfect agent.” Teaching “implies the perfect act of knowing in the teacher or master”; he must really know what he’s talking about. If not, he’s not really teaching. “When someone acquires knowledge by himself through an intrinsic principle, what in the agent cause of science does not possess the science to be acquired, save in part, namely with respect to the seminal causes of science, which are common principles.” That is, before I discover a truth, I do not have it and therefore am not perfectly knowledgeable with respect to it. In Aquinas’ sense, I haven’t truly taught it to myself, even though I have come to it ‘unaided’ except for the “seminal reasons of science” God implanted in me, by nature.

In these two questions, then, Aquinas considers teaching first with regard to the teacher, second in regard to the one taught. Knowledge in a rational animal can lead that animal either to pride or to humiliation. As an Aristotelian, Aquinas rejects the extremes, seeking the middle, readiness to teach and to discover and to learn. As a Christian, he must establish the ground of humility by distinguishing what God can teach from what man can teach, what man can learn by exercising his God-given nature and what he can learn only by God’s revelation. Teaching is humanly possible because a man can lead another man from self-evident truths to particulars. To be taught is humanly possible because human beings have been endowed by God, acting through nature, with reason, the capacity to discover and to learn the particulars, especially once reason has been “stirred” by the signs the teacher transmits through the senses to the intellect. 

 

Note

1. On Augustine’s dialogue, see “Who Is the Teacher?” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”