A Light Which Illumines and Blinds - Ch. 2 "The Negative Element" from "The Silence of St. Thomas" by Josef Pieper

Stephen Alexander Beach

(2358 Words)

"Perceiving the Unexpressed"

This chapter entitled "The Negative Element in the Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas" begins with a subsection called "Perceiving the Unexpressed", which I have quoted below in full. I have quoted the whole thing because Pieper beautifully expresses a fundamental point which relates to my study of philosophical worldviews ... and that is that every person is a so immersed in the story which dominates their age that there are layers to our beliefs that we are not even consciously aware of. Here, Pieper expresses these as the most common assumptions of a writer which are so obvious for the reader of that time that the writer does not even bother to express them explicitly. This is, of course, of great importance when trying to understand the meaning of a text in its truest sense once that epoch has passed. 

"What is self-evident is not discussed. It is taken for granted; it 'goes without saying.' Cela va sans dire. One only has to ask: What exactly is it that is taken for granted and so may remain unexpressed? 

In this seemingly innocent situation, which in its turn is largely taken for granted, there lies the most important and the peculiar difficulty of all textual interpretations: Namely, that in a passage to be elucidated certain notions remain unexpressed because they were self-evident to the author, whereas they are in no way self-evident to the man who is interpreting the text. Consequently, he does not automatically include them in his perception. And this means that the emphasis of all he does perceive in changed. In the interpretation of a text, especially one from a civilization or epoch removed from out own, what is plainly decisive and yet by no means easy is this: to grasp those basic assumptions which, remaining unexpressed, nevertheless permeate all that is actually stated; to discover, so to speak, the hidden keynote that dominates whatever has been explicitly said. 

It could be positively maintained that the doctrine of a thinker is precisely 'das im Sagen Ungesagte, the unexpressed in what is expressed.' This is how Heidegger begins his own interpretation of a Platonic text. The phrase is no doubt deliberately strained, but it is clear that an interpretation which does not reach the unspoken assumptions underlying the actual text must remain, in essence, a misinterpretation, even if in the other respects the letter of the text be commented upon with considerable learning; this latter fact may, indeed, make matters worse. 

Is there a way to get on to the track of such underlying and therefore unformulated assumptions? I think there exist several such deciphering keys. One, which I have frequently verified, is certainly this. It occasionally happens that what is unexpressed shows itself, as though through a 'hole,' through a 'gap' in the pattern, in a certain 'jump' in the development of the thought, a kind of inconsequence in the argument. (This at least is how it appears to us, who interpret and start out with other assumptions which are just as implicit and perhaps never once explicitly formulated.) What matters is that, whenever one of these seeming illogicalities is encountered, we avoid passing over it carelessly. There will be later an opportunity to speak of one concrete instance of this kind." 1

"The Hidden Key: Creation"

In this chapter Pieper is going to continually come back to the theme of creation. He holds that to understand the implicit beliefs of St. Thomas, and his work on Aristotle's philosophy, it is necessary to focus on the theme of creation, namely that everything that exists apart from God bears the metaphysical mark of "creatura". "... this createdness determines entirely and all-pervasively the inner structure of the creature." 2 And again, Pieper expresses this, "... the notion of creation determines and characterizes the interior structure of nearly all the basic concepts in St. Thomas's philosophy of Being." For example, to properly understand what Thomas means by the transcendentals, that goodness and truth are equivalent to being, one must understand that being is dependent on God, and as such goodness and truth are not qualities added on, or only potential possibilities of things, but rather they permeate all being because goodness and truth are tied to existence. And so as Pieper proceeds in this chapter to explore the inner structure of being where mystery and the via negativa hold sway, he makes it clear that this concept of the relation of creature to creator is essential in Thomas' metaphysics. 3

"'To Be True' Means To Be Creatively Thought"

In this section Pieper will explore Thomas' conception of truth in the ontological sense (the real), though he points out that logical truth in the mind cannot be divorced from its ontological basis, as modern philosophers try to do. 4 And yet he points out that the act of thought is a creative act. It is an act by which the knower creates again the essence of the thing in conceptual form in the mind. "It was, as it seems, St. Thomas's view that the notion that things have an essence cannot be separated from the other notion: that this essential character is the fruit of a form-giving thought that plans, devises, and creates." 5 And so just as man creates again in his mind when thinking of these essences, it was God's mind originally which brought them into being in the ontological sense. Pieper refers to a principle that "... things have an essential nature only insofar as they are fashioned by thought." 6 "Because and insofar as God has creatively thought things, just so and to that extent have they a nature."

"Things Can Be Known Because They Are Created"

In this section Pieper starts off with a principle taken from Aquinas' De Veritate, and that is that things exist between two intellects, the mind of God and the mind of man. 7 It is in between the archetypes of the mind of God and the copies created by the mind of man that the ontological thing exists. "In this 'localization' of existing things between the absolutely creative knowledge of God and the non-creative, reality-conformed knowledge of man is found structure of all reality as a system in which the archetypes and the copies are both embraced." 

This creativity of God Thomas connects back to the Pythagorean concept of measure. For a thing to have form is for it to have its limits set. It is the mind of God which measures all things into being. It is natural things that both receive and give measure to the human mind. And it is the human mind which is measured and also can give measure to an extent to artificial things. Thomas develops this further when talking about natural things, that they are said to be true in a twofold way, because they are created by God and because they are able to be known by the mind of man. "...there must be a double concept of the 'truth of things.' The first denotes the creative fashioning of things by God; the second their intrinsic knowability for the human mind." 8 The creative truth of God exists in the thing itself and at the same time allows that thing to be known by man. 

"Things have their intelligibility, their inner clarity and lucidity, and the power to reveal themselves, because God has creatively thought them. This is why they are essentially intelligible. Their brightness and radiance is infused into things from the creative mind of God, together with their essential being (or rather, as the very essence of that being!)." 9 Just as light makes the physical reality knowable to our bodily eyes, so too the ontological essence of things act as a light to the eyes of the rational mind, allowing us to "see" them. 10

"Things Are Unfathomable Because They Are Created"

And so the world exists between two minds, taking its existence from the creative thought of God, and being known by the intellect of man. 11 The relation between reality and the human mind can be reflected upon by human beings, one can think of the correspondence between reality and our ideas. But the relationship between the mind of God and the thing itself is a place to which we cannot go. "This relation on which the truth of things is fundamentally based - the relation between natural reality and the archetypal creative thought of God - cannot, I insist, be known formally by us. We can of course know things; we cannot formally know their truth. We know the copy, but not the relation of the copy to the archetype, the correspondence between what has been designed and its first design." 

To be unknown though can have two distinct meanings. On the one hand something can be unknown due to insufficiency of the knower, though it is knowable in itself. The other type is for something to be unknown to us and to itself. 12 But for something to exist and yet be unknowable in itself is antithetical to Thomas' notion of the universe. This is because truth is a universal or transcendental quality of being. Thus, for a thing to be is also for it to be truth, and thus to be knowable. "Being is created, that is to say creatively thought by God, it is therefore 'in itself' light, radiant, and self-revealing - precisely because it is." And thus for something to be unknowable is only that it either does not exist at all or that its being exceeds the faculty of knowing in the knower. And so, as a creature, we will never be able to comprehend fully the mystery of existence, nor even the existence of things in the world. They will always exceed our knowledge since we are not the creator of them. ",,, the very element that makes them capable of becoming known must necessarily be at the same time the reason why things are unfathomable." 13 

It is God the creator who thinks all things into being and sees them in their constancy. And so proceeding from the intellect of God, truth and existence are equivalent, and truth belongs to the very structure of being itself. "The essence of all things (as creatures) is that they are formed after an archetypal pattern which dwells in the absolutely creative mind of God." 

And so truth and being are not only equivalent, but one could also say that being and to be as a particular thing are equivalent given that truth is inherent in being. "As we have said, St. Thomas, in his study of the truth of things, which means the nature of things, was obviously unable to ignore or 'leave out' this correspondence between things and their divine exemplars." 14 "... to phrase it differently, an existing thing is true to the extend that it reproduces the pattern of divine knowledge." 15 And yet to understand the essence of a thing, or what it is, is a process which is never complete. This is because it's inner intelligibility proceeds from God's divine intelligibility which is incomprehensible. 16 God, too, is incomprehensible to us as far as what he is, his essence, as we can no direct experience of this. Hence the need to do negative theology and philosophy with regard to such issues. 17 

Pieper points to many quotes of St. Thomas showing that we cannot know the essence or substance of things in and of themselves, but we know them through indirect attributes and effects. Thus, things have an eternal name which represents them in their fullness from the divine mind. (Lots of good quotes to look up on this page*) 18 "... the special manner in which the Divine Perfection is imitated is what constitutes the special essence of a thing. 'Every creature has its own proper species (propriam speciem) according to which it participates in some way in the likeness of the Divine Essence. Therefore, as God knows His Essence as so imitable by such a creature (ut sic imitabilem a tali creatura), He knows it as the particular model and idea of that creature.'" 19

To summarize is being said, "... the ultimate reality of things is something to which we can never finally penetrate, because we can never fully grasp these likenesses of the Divine Ideas precisely as likenesses." In other words, again, our knowledge of the nature and essence of things is always limited and conditional, though they are not necessarily in themselves. 20

"Hope As the Structure of Creaturely Knowledge" 

All of this limitation does not mean that man does not penetrate the essence of things at all. In fact, it is only in attaining these essences does he realize that he cannot obtain them fully, as the light of the sun allows the eyes to see it, yet blinds the eye from seeing it fully. 21 "In other words, things in so far as they are creatively thought by God possess these two properties: on the one hand their ontological clarity and self-revelation and, on the other hand, their inexhaustibleness; their knowability as well as their 'unknowability.'" Thus, St. Thomas' philosophy is not agnostic, nor is it reducible to a closed system of deductions. Rather, there is an element of both, being alive and open to existence and yet finding there guiding truths which shape reality and the mind. 22 If we talk about a negative theology or philosophy, one must always remember that this is against the background of a positive affirmation of the intelligibility of being. "In the last resort, things are inaccessible to human knowledge precisely because they are all too knowable. .. 'As the eyes of bats are dazzled by sunlight, so it is with human intelligence when face to face with what is by nature most obvious.'" 23

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1 - Piper, Josef. The Silence of St. Thomas. Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Co., 1966. 45, 46

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