I’ve recently had cause to say to more than one person, as a way of explanation for why I think the way I do, “But I take Thomist metaphysics for granted.” Now, don’t run away. I’m not going to make this blog, or even this post, about philosophy or dogmatic theology. And I’m more than aware of just how reasonable it is to run the other way from people who are more Thomist than Thomas Aquinas. There is a certain way of treating Thomas that is insufferable, if not spiritually stinting or even toxic. I run the other way from that, too.

But I think that there is another approach, beyond imagining that the Angelic Doctor had an answer for everything, created a water-tight system, or is a wonderful source for proof-texting and even beating your opponents, be they theological or cultural, over the head. I have for a long time struggled to articulate the approach in words. Recently, I’ve decided that it might be put that way: “taking Thomist metaphysics for granted.”

When you take something for granted, it’s not a big deal to you. You don’t go around arguing about its minutiae with fellow adepts (though there remains a place for the academic life, to be sure). Nor do you bludgeon other people with these truths and proselytize (something which I don’t think there’s any place for whatsoever). You just accept it. It informs your way of living. You might even try to get creative in taking its positions for granted by trying to come up with new solutions, projects, and responses to the crazy world that you inhabit. But you don’t get hung up on the thing itself. Your conscious concerns are elsewhere.

This position of “taking Thomist metaphysics for granted” might sound unnecessary, but if I look back, I find that a lot of the people who have influenced me the most, or with whom I have converged the most, have done the same thing. They accept it. They move on. They use this presupposition creatively and fruitfully for the good of God, their neighbour, and themselves.

John of the Cross

Chief among those who adopt such an approach is, I think, John of the Cross. Throughout the Ascent and the Dark Night in particular, certain Aristotelian or Thomistic principles recur. If you flip through the complete works looking for references to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, you’ll find a lot. These are all axioms that John takes for granted but then applies to his goal of explaining contemplation from the subjective perspective of the person praying. For example:

• John says that two contraries cannot coexist in the same subject, thus explaining that we need to rid ourselves of certain attachments or inclinations in order to reach God (Ascent 1.4.2; 1.6.1; cf. Aristotle, On Sensation 8; On Generation and Decay 1.3; On the Soul 3.4; Aquinas, ST I.19.9; I.118.2.2; I-II.113.6.2).
• He mentions the way that knowledge arises in the soul in scholastic terms (Night 2.3.2; cf. Aristotle, On the Soul 1.2; 3.8).
• He uses and alludes to Aristotle’s famous image of the sun being dark to the eyes of the bat to illustrate how God is dark to the eyes of the intellect because he exceeds our natural capacity (Ascent 2.8.6; 2.14.11; Night 2.5.3; cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 2.1).
• Piggybacking on the previous ideas, he declares that all means must be proportionate to their end (Ascent 2.8.2; cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 2.1; Aquinas, ST I-II.2.96.1; I-II.102.1; I-II.114.2).
• John accepts the scholastic categorization of passions (e.g., Ascent 1.13.5; 2.21.8; 3.16.2; Night 1.13.15; Canticle 20.4; 28.4; 40.4; cf. Aquinas, ST I-II.25.4)—though this is arguably not metaphysics, but physical science or psychology.
• He says that anything received must be received according to the mode of the receiver, wrongly attributing this claim to Aristotle—but this is a metaphysical notion on full display in Thomas, anyway (Ascent 4.1.2; Night 2.16.4; Flame 3.34; cf. Aquinas, ST I.79.6).
• John uses the principle that a living being lives by its operations to prove that, if the soul’s operations have been purified and simplified in charity enough to be in God through union with him, thus the one at such a stage of the spiritual journey lives the life of God himself (Flame 2.34; cf. Aristotle, On the Soul 2.13; Aquinas, ST I.18.2–4; II-II.23.2).

These are just examples from the footnotes to the complete works in English.[1] I’m sure there are plenty more.

In every case, however, note what John does. He doesn’t for one moment care about arguing about these things or even about converting you to believe they are true. He thinks they make sense and doesn’t bother to get disputational. They function as starting points or tools. John uses them to leap into a creative solution to the practical problem that concerns him: How can we understand Christian contemplation? The things that preoccupy him do not include Thomas’ philosophy as such. What he wants to do is to find first principles that are solid enough to build an understanding of such a precarious thing as Christian prayer in its skyrocketing, contemplative forms. And he doesn’t want to just understand it from the outside. He wants to understand so as to make better sense of his personal experience and so as to better able to guide others along these difficult-to-navigate paths.

He takes this for granted in order to answer the problems of his day, to figure out what to do now and how to respond to the graces that God is present in the moment that he lives in. This is one of the things I have always found attractive about John, because I appreciate just how difficult the task of understanding contemplation has always been, and there are dime-a-dozen attempts to build an understanding on sand, and they have never ended well.

Pope Francis

Yes, Pope Francis. Open up the intellectual biography by Massimo Borghesi and you’ll find considerable attention given to the dialectical Thomism of Alberto Methol Ferré.[2] This is one of the foundations for Pope Francis’ vision of tensions and their resolution—a mindset that has given rise to a project as grand as the Synod on Synodality, for one thing.

Moreover, the Holy Father is perfectly frank and upfront about how Thomas’ principles have informed some of the decisions which we might say grate the most on his adversaries’ ears. Pay careful attention to Evangelii Gaudium, Misericordiae Vultus, or Gaudete et Exsultate and you’ll see Thomas invoked to justify the assertion that the absolute greatest virtue that can be shown to anyone who is not God is mercy, and that moreover, it is mercy which is the greatest virtue that God even shows towards us (EG 37; MV 6; GE 106; cf. Aquinas, ST II-II.30.4).

The controversial eighth chapter of Amoris Laetitia is also Thomist in inspiration: “Saint Thomas Aquinas himself recognized that someone may possess grace and charity, yet not be able to exercise any one of the virtues well; in other words, although someone may possess all the infused moral virtues, he does not clearly manifest the existence of one of them, because the outward practice of that virtue is rendered difficult” (AL 301; cf. Aquinas, ST I-II.65.3.2–3; De malo, 2.2). Pope Francis himself recounts the story of the genesis of this eighth chapter as follows:

Yet the Spirit saved us in the end, in a breakthrough at the close of the second (October 2015) meeting of the Synod on the Family. The overflow, in this case, came above all through those with a deep knowledge of Saint Thomas Aquinas, among them the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn. They recovered the true moral doctrine of the authentic scholastic tradition of Saint Thomas, rescuing it from the decadent scholasticism that had led to a casuistic morality.

Because of the immense variety of situations and circumstances people found themselves in, Aquinas’s teaching that no general rule could apply in every situation allowed the synod to agree on the need for a case-by-case discernment. There was no need to change the Church’s law, only how it was applied. By attending to the specifics of each case, attentive to God’s grace operating in the nitty-gritty of people’s lives, we could move on from the black-and-white moralism that risked closing off paths of grace and growth. It was neither a tightening nor a loosening of the “rules” but an application of them that left room for circumstances that didn’t fit neatly into categories.

This was the great breakthrough the Spirit brought us: a better synthesis of truth and mercy in a fresh understanding drawn from within our own Tradition. Without changing law or doctrine but recovering an authentic meaning of both, the Church is now better able to walk with people who are living together or divorced, to help them see where God’s grace is operating in their lives, and to help them embrace the fullness of Church teaching. Chapter 8 of the post-synod document I issued in April 2016, Amoris Laetitia, draws on the pure doctrine of Aquinas. Yet it’s still hard for some to accept this process: a sign of how many remain not only conditioned by casuistic positions, but also of how their intentions, visions, and even ideologies prevent them from recognizing a synodal path safeguarded by the Church’s own Tradition.[3]

Cardinal Schönborn is given credit. But Pope Francis both appreciates the exact solution being found in the Aquinate’s works and explains the event as an act of resolving tensions and difficulties, as he learned from the dialectical Thomism of Methol Ferré. The eighth chapter of Amoris Laetitia is an extremely Thomistic thing. It comes into being from the application of one kind of Thomistic thinking to create a situation of dialectical tension. The exact answer to the tension is sourced in Thomas himself.

Finally, Pope Francis has been abundantly clear about how he thinks scholarly study of and with Thomas Aquinas should function. In an 2022 address to the International Thomistic Congress, he said:

It is necessary to promote, following Jacques Maritain’s expression, a “living Thomism”, capable of renewal in order to respond to today’s questions. In this way, Thomism advances, in a vital dual “systolic and diastolic” movement. Systolic, because there is a need to focus on the study of the work of Saint Thomas in its historical and cultural context, to identify the structural principles and to grasp their originality. Then, however, there is the diastolic movement: to address today’s world in dialogue, so as to assimilate critically what is true and right in the culture of the time.

In other words, there is room for discussing the man himself. But for the love of God, this is not a museum piece! It must be alive. You have to also just move on and take something for granted and deal with the world we live in, tackle the challenges of the day, use what firm things you have in a way that generates genuinely creative and ever-new answers to the problems that face us. Stop navel-gazing, at least from time to time, and take some things for granted so that you can be with the world and live in it and contemplate it and respond to it. “Realities are greater than ideas” (EG 231–233).

Ah, and yes, speaking of Jacques Maritain…

Jacques and Raïssa Maritain

There is no doubt whatsoever that the husband-wife duo of the Maritains constitute a prime example of taking Thomist metaphysics for granted to generate new, ever-living answers to the questions of the day (like grounding freedom, democracy, and human rights for Catholic thought, or coming up with a Christian philosophy of history—important questions of the day). Étienne Gilson famously didn’t understand this, and decades into their friendship, he finally appreciated that while he (Gilson) was trying to reconstruct exactly what Thomas Aquinas had thought in his day, proceeding historically, Jacques was trying to create his own philosophy, answer his own questions, move through the world of culture as it existed. The contributions of Jacques Maritain to this field are immense. In fact, they’re mind-boggling great. There is a reason why Pope Paul VI presented him with the message to intellectuals at the close of Vatican II, the council of aggiornamento.

Most importantly, though, for this blog, both Jacques and Raïssa used the philosophy of “taking for granted” in the realm of the spiritual life. For them, Thomas Aquinas was a discovery on the journey. They remained solid in his basics, in his first principles. But they wanted to launch deeper into love, contemplative love. Thomas, they didn’t find, was the immediate guide for that. Their guides were Gertrude, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Thérèse of Lisieux (for Raïssa, anyway), Charles de Foucauld… but Thomas was their backbone. He held it together. He gave them ground to explore all these others, and understand them better, as was difficult in coming from a cultural background in philosophy outside the Church. They did not doubt the foundations Thomas gave them. Both Maritains are famously “Thomists.” But they arguably—especially Raïssa, but not excluding Jacques—treated the foundation more as a launching pad than as a place to study concrete.

The whole notion of “contemplation on the roads” originates with Jacques and Raïssa.[4] But if we read them carefully, we’ll find that without their background in Thomas Aquinas, they would never have learned to run as they did and as far as they did, and they would never have come up with their contemplative aggiornamento: moving contemplative prayer truly beyond the cloister walls; supporting Louis Gardet, René Voillaume, and the nascent Little Brothers of Jesus in their seemingly insane project; distinguishing the fact, which perhaps no one before them ever did, that while Christian contemplation is always of the same essence as the contemplation of the Divinity and of the Three Divine Persons, contemplation of the Humanity of Jesus and contemplation of Christ in our neighbour are the two most congenial paths of contemplative prayer for the person engaged with the world. There was just a firmness in the basics that they got from Thomas that they did not get elsewhere. Yet they ran wild. Gladly. Adventurously. In suffering, but joyfully.

Conclusion

I get what you’re saying. “But I take Thomist metaphysics for granted.” I’m not interested in either debating these foundations (though I of course develop and, I suppose, I implicitly contradict as it becomes necessary). Still less do I want to proselytize about the advantages of any philosophical schools. But I’ve learned from some of the greatest masters of the spiritual life—and I would struggle to respect an opinion that would deny the place of any of John of the Cross, the Maritains, and Pope Francis on that list—that sometimes you just take Thomas Aquinas for granted, and in return, you run wild and adventurously, and this applies especially in the contemplative life, and if possible, even more especially when it comes to the dynamics and explications of contemplation on the muddy roads. It’s an option not to be scoffed at.

Thomist metaphysics may be something I take for granted. But Thomas himself is not someone I take for granted. Even though it’s Sunday and the Lord’s day has taken precedence, if you’re celebrating Thomas Aquinas in any manner today: happy feast day!

[1] The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, 3^rd ed., trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2017).

[2] Massimo Borghesi, The Mind of Pope Francis, trans. Barry Hudock (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2018),73 –75, 82, 85–89, 101.

[3] Pope Francis in conversation with Austen Ivereigh, Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 88–89.

[4] Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Liturgy and Contemplation, trans. Joseph W. Evans (New York: P.J. Kenedy, 1960), 74–75.