For Aquinas, the existence of God is a philosophical issue, not just a theological one. It’s something one can arrive at through natural reason. But, the God one arrives at through reason is “Actus Purus” or the “subsistent act of being”[1]. The notion that God is triune, or becomes incarnate, is not something natural reason can tell one. All arguments purporting to show these doctrines a priori from reason (such as those from Richard Swinburne) are false, and guilty of a kind of category error. On the flipside, saying “I only believe in the truths of reason” as one’s reason for not believing the Articles of Faith is really a kind of tautology. Truths of reason belong to the order and apparatus of reason, truths of faith belong to the order and apparatus of faith. To state that one does not believe in the latter because it cannot be proven by the former is a category error. While I use the term “category error” here, this is not to indicate a “hard bifurcation” between faith and reason per se. For Aquinas, truth is totally unified, and reason/faith both lead us to truth. Yet, the two are distinct. This distinction does not require them to be separable. Some aspects of the one truth are accessible to reason, and other aspects of this same unified truth are only accessible by faith.

So what relation can reason have to faith?

Thomas says that reason can do two things regarding the articles of faith.

1) It can demonstrate that the Articles of Faith contain no *formal* contradictions. But it can never exhaustively demonstrate that they contain no *latent* contradictions.

2) It can provide arguments of “appropriateness”. For example, we might say “It is appropriate for God to be triune because <insert reasoning here>”. But this is a far-cry from saying one has found an argument that binds one, on pain of irrationality, to posit God’s tri-unity.

[1]The fact that God is, in some sense, not totally impersonal is for Aquinas also a truth of philosophy, not theology.

Although “Actus Purus” can sound pretty cold and impersonal, Aquinas gives philosophical arguments for why God must be in some sense “personal.” To make a long argument very short, if Aquinas’ Fifth Way is successful, it follows that God has something like an intellect. If God has an intellect, then (re:Aristotle, will always follows intellect) God must have something like a will. If God has something like an intellect and a will, then it follows that God cannot be totally “impersonal”- something cannot have “intellect” and “will” and be validly described as “not a person”. From this argument, Aquinas pivots to his “Argument for the Divine Attributes”, which flow from Actus Purus’ having something analogous to an intellect and a will. Once we get these divine attributes slotted in (the attributes are 1) simplicity, 2) perfection, 3) goodness, 4) infinity, 5) ubiquity, 6) immutability, 7) eternity, and 8) unity), we are definitely looking at some form of theism (though admittedly, we are very far from the God of the Bible, it would appear!). It is most certainly not the totally impersonal God of the deists or pantheists, etc.

Let’s take it back a step further. This is where we must deploy common sense from our everyday experiences. If we analyze ourselves and how we come to deploy reason -and arrive at conclusions- we will surely see that at the beginning of every rational process lies a fiduciary element. An implicit, un-proveable trust in the reality’s consistency- its disclosure of itself- and of our ability to cognitively apprehend said reality. If there is a “seed” of faith at the bottom of every rational process (which seems pretty self-evident to me) which reason needs to get off-the-ground, why should we then go along with the Enlightenment project of positing a harsh bifurcation between these two faculties? It seems to me much more in keeping with the data of our actual lived experience to see the relationship of reason to faith as inherently nuptial- something which cannot actually be put asunder. Human beings possess reason/faith as “one coin” – yet it is certainly a coin with two sides. Both sides of the coin work together to bring us to understanding in the most basic aspects of our cognitive processes.

The Thomist position, it needs to be stated, is neither rationalist nor fideist. It is compatibilist. It is fitting then that the Catholic Church has condemned both rationalism and fideism as heretical. Both of these extremes are distortions.

Rather, the Thomist position sees reason and faith as the “two wings” which the human soul needs in order to take flight into true enlightenment. Both fideism and rationalism are the equivalent of trying to fly with only one wing.

In closing, I will leave the reader with something to meditate on.

Aquinas would say that we only know the truths of faith through the virtue of wisdom.

What does it mean to know something “through a virtue”?

Why did the early moderns not see this sort of robust virtue-epistemology as a viable option, and is it a viable option today? I think that it is, but that will have to wait for future discussion.

[Note]

For a detailed analysis of Aquinas on faith, epistemic justifications, and answers to traditional objections, Eleonore Stump’s 2008 book, “Aquinas,” looks very promising. She writes:

“While in Aquinas’ view it would be a mistake to suppose that faith is acquired by an exercise of reason, reason may nonetheless clear away some of the obstacles that bar the believer’s way to faith. On this way of thinking about faith, the intellect assents to the propositions of faith in virtue of the will’s moving it to assent because of the will’s desire for God’s goodness when the object of the will is not sufficient by itself to move the intellect. Nonetheless, the resulting belief is not simply a case of wish-fulfillment beliefs. Aquinas’ metaphysics of being and goodness gives an explanation for why belief in the propositions of faith is justified, in a way that other wish-fulfillment beliefs could not be. In addition, although the metaphysics of goodness and being explains the certitude of faith as regards the propositions believed, it is the will’s cleaving to God’s goodness that explains the certitude of faith as regards the believer. … Finally, Aquinas’ account of faith has the advantage of explaining why an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good God would let the epistemic relation of human beings to himself rest on faith, rather than knowledge, and why a person’s having faith should be thought to be meritorious in any way, because it holds volitionally produced faith to be the beginning of salvation for a person, in the process of justification by faith, to which I now turn.”