Book review: Aquinas, by Copleston

Aquinas is dead famous, and F C Copleston is quite famous too; as a convert to Catholicism and a priest, I think I can trust that he is about as sympathetic to Big Tom as one could possibly be, as so will feel no need to make any further allowances. You will find the text here, should you be feeling brave. Although the book is well enough written I would not recommend reading it, unless you're interested in BigT, and I would recommend that you not be interested.

Because: BigT is fundamentally second-rate; just a sterile synthesiser of Aristotle into Catholicism. As Russell puts it:

There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead⁴. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading. I cannot, therefore, feel that he deserves to be put on a level with the best philosophers either of Greece or of modern times.

The book covers his metaphysics, and his theology, and their overlap. The metaphysics covers such fundamentally uninteresting things as "the whole is greater than any of its parts". That is uninteresting, when applied to the real world, because it is just the bleedin' obvious¹. Unfortunately as well as being the bleedin' obvious in the physical world it has the virtue of being false in the metaphysical world, since the defining property of an infinite set - such as the integers - is that is can be put into one-to-one correspondence with a proper subset - such as the square numbers. Coplestone attempts to evade this by saying that he doesn't want to get into the complications of infinite sets, but this will not do, because excluding infinite sets is to restrict the statement precisely to those things it is true for; it is like saying "all numbers are even (errm, cough, I exlcude odd numbers of course)". So the metaphysics veers between dull and wrong, and if there's any point in it, I missed it³. Maybe the stuff about essence and so on comes in here, and other uninteresting stuff carried over from Aristotle but really best forgotten.

We then get some of the proofs of God. These are all wrong, of course, for reasons ranging from the possibility of an infinite regress, to the problem that none of them generate a Christian God even if they did work.

A potentially nice bit is that BigT correctly realises that his arguments cannot derive all aspects of Christian doctrine - for example, the Trinity - and he is quite happy to rest those upon Revelation. So far, so good. But (unlike Hobbes) he doesn't think this through: if the Trinity, for example, is known by Revelation - presumably, to whoever wrote it down into the Bible or wherever it first gets written down - then everyone else only knows it by acceptance-of-authority²; and he is quite clear that no aspect of God can be positively known by sense-experience of the world.

He makes a stab at deriving morality, but at least as reported it isn't a very good one, as it amounts to we should strive for the good and avoid evil; unfortunately he doesn't really have a good definition of good. He also seems to think that our ultimate aim is the ultimate good which is God; this passes happily straight by Copleston but won't pass in the real world; happily we real humans don't have to live with such a pre-imposed goal and have the wider spaces of human flourishing available to us.

There's the problem of Evil to deal with too. This is mostly defined away by thinking of Evil as Privation, I suppose mostly Privation-of-God, and so since that makes it a negative thing, God isn't responsible for it, God is only responsible for presences, not absences. This isn't a bad start but alas it fails on, e.g., mass-death-from-earthquakes. Coplestone hasn't the heart to discuss that, but I think BigT would be forced to fall back upon: dying in God's Grace is no evil. Alas, yer common man is not going to take mega-death-is-all-fine, so we don't say that in public; instead, Coplestone just emits what looks to me to be a large amount of squid ink at this point and hopes we all get bored and start skipping,which I did.

Notes

1. With a part understood as a proper part, obvs.

2. You could save this by asserting that God reveals the authority of the Bible to everyone, but that would be kinda awkward  - why didn't I get the message - and I don't think anyone actually tries that.

3. Not to be laid at BigT's door, but browing a "guide to modern metaphysics" in Heffers I found a chapter on McT's drivel about time.

4. But Big Bertie is idealising here: Plato's Socrates has an agenda too, he's just a bit more subtle about pushing it. But the distinction is still there: P is at least pushing his own agenda; BigT is pushing the church's.