Thomas Aquinas was the Problem; the Reformation was the Solution

“Where was your Church before Aquinas”

Ever since the Reformation, Roman Catholics have been fond of asking, “Where was your Church before the Reformation”. Protestants have a good reply to that: “Where was your Church before Aquinas”.

Peter Lombard (in his “Sentences”) summarized church teaching up to that point (approximately 1150). Aquinas later opposed Lombard on one key point (“justification extra nos”, or the external righteousness of Christ), and Luther took up Lombard’s side:

In book 1, Distinction 17 of his famed Sentences, Lombard, discussing religious justification, asked: “Is the love by which we are saved a created habit in our soul, or is it the very person of the Holy Spirit dwelling within us?” Is that which heals and saves a person part of his own nature, something he himself has developed as his own possession [inherent righteousness], or is it the indwelling spirit of God, a divine power in him but not of him [alien righteousness]?

Lombard opted for the latter solution, maintaining that the love by which people love God and their fellow man so as to merit salvation [“merit” being a whole ’nother story] was the spirit of God working internally, without their aid or volition. Man is saved by an uncreated, not a created habit, by uncreated, not created, love, by the holy spirit within, not by an acquired talent he can call his very own. When the young Luther wrote hs commentary on the Sentences in 1509/10, he strongly agreed, against the majority of scholastics, with this interpretation by Lombard.

Thomas Aquinas opposed Lombard in this issue, arguing that saving charity [“charity” being “love” in the Roman Catholic schema] must be a voluntary act arising from a disposition man could call his own.

Roman Catholics claim that Martin Luther was the innovator, but in reality, Thomas Aquinas was a far more extensive innovator than Luther ever was. The problem was, “The Church of Rome” liked what Aquinas had to say, and they canonized it.

The Reformers sought to roll back many of the changes that Aquinas put into place. And in doing so, they relied on earlier traditions than did Aquinas.

It was Aquinas who not only introduced Aristotle to the Roman church, but he wrapped Aristotelian philosophy around Christian doctrine and handed it to “the Church” as a complete package. One that supported the Roman Church’s view of its own authority and necessity.

The grand synthesis with Aristotelian philosophy

Here’s why “Thomism” works today: Roman Catholicism is built on “Thomism”. That is, from, say, the late middle ages all the way through to about 1900, “Thomism” provided the philosophical (and theological) building blocks for Roman Catholicism. At the Council of Trent, Thomism ruled the thinking of the day. At the Vatican I Council, Thomism ruled the thinking of the day.

When you see a phrase like “Thomas Aquinas points out … ”, as you do in the article that Steve linked below, keep in mind that if Thomas said it, then somebody else most likely said it first. And they frequently said it in a different context.

Thomas was a solid thinker, to be sure. But many of the thoughts that he built with were not his own. They were an amalgamation of other sources. And frequently, those sources were not sound sources. Much of what he said had an “early church” (i.e. “neo-Platonic”) philosophical foundation.

And much of this came in the form of a reliance on Pseudo-Dionysius (a 6th century neo-Platonic writer who either portrayed himself or whose works were falsely portrayed as having been written by the 1st century companion of Paul from Acts 17).

Aquinas’s writings on the papacy were also shaped by forgeries such as the 9th century Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals – Aquinas was a great “synthesizer” and he synthesized such things into other, more legitimate writings.

Perhaps the “synthesis” that Aquinas is best known for is his grand synthesis with Aristotelian philosophy.

Ancient Greece had an abundance of philosophers, most famously, Socrates, his pupil Plato, and Plato’s pupil, Aristotle.

Of course, each of these men had their own followings, and by the time the early church was spreading out in the Greek-thinking Roman empire (the Romans had very few thoughts of their own), much of Aristotle was lost, except to some in the Persian hinterlands.

After the Crusades, Aristotle was brought back into the Roman sphere, and for a while, Aristotelian thinking was causing quite a stir.

Albert the Great was probably the first European Medieval thinker to study Aristotle – and Aquinas was his student. It was Aquinas who put into place “the Synthesis”.

Here is what Steven Ozment (“The Age of Reform, 1250-1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe” New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ©1980) had to say about Aquinas’s synthesis:

Before the Ockhamists (Ockham: 1288-1347) made Pelagianism a major issue in medieval theology, the scholastic debate over religious justification focused on the question of how grace could be present in man’s soul. How can something divine be within human nature? If medieval philosophers had problems conceiving the existence of a universal within a particular, there were even greater difficulties for theologians who tried to imagine godly purity within a finite sinful creature.

Peter Lombard determined the direction of this prolonged debate. In book 1, Distinction 17 of his famed Sentences, Lombard, discussing religious justification, asked: “Is the love by which we are saved a created habit in our soul, or is it the very person of the Holy Spirit dwelling within us?” Is that which heals and saves a person part of his own nature, something he himself has developed as his own possession, or is it the indwelling spirit of God, a divine power in him but not of him? Lombard opted for the latter solution.

Here we see Luther’s extra nos justification. Lombard (1100-1160) had agreed with Luther’s solution.

Lombard opted for the latter solution, maintaining that the love by which people love God and their fellow man so as to merit salvation [“merit” being a whole ’nother story] was the spirit of God working internally, without their aid or volition. Man is saved by an uncreated, not a created habit, by uncreated, not created, love, by the holy spirit within, not by an acquired talent he can call his very own. When the young Luther wrote hs commentary on the Sentences in 1509/10, he strongly agreed, against the majority of scholastics, with this interpretation by Lombard.

Thomas Aquinas opposed Lombard in this issue, arguing that saving charity [“charity” being “love” in the Roman Catholic schema] must be a voluntary act arising from a disposition man could call his own.

Intrinsic righteousness as the novelty

So here is Aquinas, insisting (contra everything that the prior church had taught) that man’s salvation must be intrinsic to himself, not “extrinsic” – that is, it’s not the indwelling Holy Spirit that provides man’s salvation – but rather, it’s man’s own acts which must make him righteous.

This is where “Augustine’s Goof” finds itself in the middle ages – in a kind of hangover from Augustine’s iustificare it’s “the bookend” on another turning point in “Roman” “Catholic” history. Continuing with Ozment:

[Aquinas] wrote in pointed summary:

Peter Lombard held that charity was not a created reality, but the Holy Spirit dwelling in the soul. He did not mean that the Holy Spirit was identified with our movement of love, but that charity, unlike the other virtues, such as faith and hope, was not elicited from a habit which was really our own. [In this] he was trying to enhance charity …. This opinion [however] tends rather to discredit charity. It would mean that active charity rises from the Holy Spirit so moving the in that we are merely passive, and not responsible for our loving or otherwise. This militates against the character of a voluntary act. Charity would not then be a voluntary act. There is a problem here, for our loving is very much our own.

According to Aquinas, grace is in the soul as a reality connatural [innate] to man; otherwise, saving acts of charity [again, the whole “merit” thing] would be done involuntarily and, as it were, by another. Although its ultimate origin is divine, the love by which people love God and their fellow man in a saving way is created love, a truly human habit.

We see here where the Reformed responses then, come, vs Aquinas.

Individuals of the Reformation and post-Reformation periods actually spent the time to sort out all of these things – that’s why their writings are so voluminous, and that’s why we don’t really understand what they were saying. It’s because the medieval writers were seemingly so far afield, so much of the time, that it is (in our age) just simpler to chuck them out the window.


William Edgar (in “A Theological Guide to Calvin’s Institues”, eds. Hall and Lillback, Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, ©2008) points out that “What [Calvin] attacks most in his admonitions to properly respect others [“love of God and neighbors”] is pride”. Edgar continues:

Following tradition, [Calvin] recognizes this greatest vice [pride] as the mother of all sins. Throughout the Institutes Calvin stresses the importance of considering our tendency to arrogance and merit. He reminds us that any talent that we have received is from the Lord, a gift, not a meritorious accomplishment. When we realize that we have nothing that we have not received, then we may bestow to others the honor that they are due, being properly reverent and lowly toward them.

He goes on … to remind us that any gift we have is for the sake of the church. Following Paul in his letters to the Corinthians, and many other biblical passages, he explains that every good gift we have is meant not for ourselves, but to be distributed for our neighbor’s good. He introduces the notion of stewardship, which is so strongly present in his any works, which would become so central to later Reformed theology (326-327).

The discussion here involves a whole range of theological topics – the Image of God in man, nature and grace, the state of fallen man, the freedom vs the bondage of the human will. Each of these topics has its own historical trajectories.

Edgar notes in a footnote, “while reminding the reader about the nobility of the human race and our free will, [Calvin] explains that the original sin has damaged our grandeur through pride. In his long and thoughtful defense of free will, his chief concern is that we distinguish between our natural free will and the part of freedom which has been lost through sin (see 2.1.4) (pg 326).

But the bottom line is that Aquinas followed an Aristotelian notion of affixing “forms” within “the thing itself”, and thus, the “love” with which man loves (and with which he obtains inherent merit) must itself inhere within the person. But Rome and its hierarchy, its sacerdotal priesthood, is made more important in this scheme, and the work of the Holy Spirit in man is reduced. The intitiative of God is made subservient to the sacraments of Rome. Thus, as Ozment continues with Aquinas:

Aquinas found a solution in Aristotelian philosophy. Grace, he argued, is in the soul not as a substantial form, but as an accidental form (forma accidentalis). In Aristotelian philosophy a substantial form denotes the essence of a thing, that which makes it what it is or in terms of which it is defined. Man’s substantial form, for example, is his reason; reason makes man a unique creature and defines his nature. An accidental form, by contrast, while very much a part of an individual, remains nonessential to its definition as the particular thing that it is. A man’s color, height, and such acquired abilities as running and singing, for example, are accidental forms, nonessential to his being as a rational creature (Ozment, pgs. 31-32).

The Sacramental Treadmill

What this leads to is the concept of “the infused habit of grace”. It is with this infusion (for Rome, it comes at baptism) that makes one a Christian. (In Aquinas’s day, only those within the Church, or desiring to be so – having a “baptism of desire” – could be saved). For Aquinas, someone not having this “infused habit of grace” would not be a Christian – this is how Rome avoids the notion that it is a Pelagian system.

However, after baptism, whereas this “infused habit of grace” could never be completely lost, it could still “for long periods of time go unexercised”. And if it lasted long enough, and if you died outside this “state of grace”, you don’t end up in heaven when you die.

This state of affairs is enabled by the “accidental” concept: “grace is not in the soul as its substance; neither is it there so as to be absolutely no part of it; it is really but accidentally there (Ozment, 33).

So you get this infusion “accidental grace”, and it is yours then, throughout your lifetime, either to work to increase it (as a habit), or to let it go dormant. Mortal sin would make it go away, and ONLY the sacrament of penance (mediated ONLY through the Roman priesthood) could bring it back.

This is why the Roman Church embraced Aquinas so enthusiastically – because Aquinas enshrined the Roman Catholic sacraments as the primary, and even the only means of grace.

Lombard, Scotus and Luther vs Aquinas on Righteousness

Aquinas – “Thomism” – didn’t win the day because it was the most brilliant or sensible thinking of the middle ages. It won the day because Rome saw that his “synthesis” gave the most enablement to its own evolving theory of how the sacraments worked (and provided “a reason why” for the Sacerdotal system of mediation) – that’s why Thomism is still with us today.

Not only did Thomas disagree with earlier understandings of grace (see Lombard, above), but in his own time, he had fierce opponents. Duns Scotus was one of these. Here is how Scotus perceived Aquinas:

Duns Scotus (ca 1265-1308) led a critical Franciscan reaction to Aquinas’s views on the infused habit of grace. Strongly influenced by Augustine’s teaching on predestination, Scotus looked with suspicion on the definition of Christians in terms of something they could possess as their own within their souls. Did this mean that God, who is omnipotent and free over creation, was in some way bound to accidental forms within the souls of mere creatures, obliged to save any and all who tried to love him habitually? Was not God free to be where and with whom he pleased, regardless of the qualifying circumstances? (Ozment 33)

We see this question asked over and over again in Christian history.

What God decreed in man’s regard was far more important to his salvation than any quality of soul he might come to possess; people were saved only because God first willed it, never because they were intrinsically worth it.

Before Ockham turned his razor against Scotist and Thomist epistemology, Scotus applied a razor of his own to Thomist soteriology on this particular issue. Scotus stated his principle of theological economy in the axiom “Nothing created must, for reasons intrinsic to it, be accepted by God” (nihil creatum formaliter est a deo acceptandum). This meant that created and finite could in no way could determine what was uncreated and infinite. Every relationship God had outside himself was, by definition, absolutely free, contingent, unconditioned, in no way obligatory. From Scotus’s perspective, Aquinas bound God too closely to the church’s system of grace and tended to lose sight of the great distance that obtained between God’s eternal will and its execution in time through created orders and finite agents. (Ozment 33)

One might go further and suggest that not only did Aquinas bind God too closely to the church’s system of grace, but he also bound it too closely, not only to “created orders and finite agents”, but to the entire Roman Catholic system, including, say, he most wicked scum-of-the-earth popes who ever lived.

Here is where a study of God’s holiness, of his holy character, are highly in order. This is a matter of Who God is.

Continuing with Ozment:

Thomist theology seemed to run the danger of entangling the divine will in the secondary causation of the church, priests, sacraments, and accidental forms of grace. While Aquinas believed with every medieval theologian that God could never properly be called a debtor to man, he did argue that God was a debtor to himself, to what he, as First Cause, had established. In this sense God remained obligated to himself to carry through to a salutary conclusion what he had freely set in motion, a debtor to his chosen system of salvation.

Scotus certainly had no desire to place God’s ordinations in doubt, but he did look on them as utterly contingent and playing only a secondary role in the economy of salvation. Severe qualifications were theoretically placed on the media of salvation—churches priests, sacraments, and infused grace—lest they presume upon God’s sovereignty over his creation and the primacy of his will in salvation (Ozment 33-34) ….

This subtle but important difference between Scotus and Aquinas on the nature and role of secondary causes in salvation found expression also in their understanding of the way sacraments work. For Aquinas, sacraments were instrumental causes of grace and salvation. They really contained and communicated grace; that was why they were so indispensable to salvation. A parallel may here be drawn with Thomist epistemology: as Aquinas believed that universals were really in things and, as so-called intelligible species, also really in the mind, so he believed that grace was really in sacramental rituals and elements and, as an accidental form, also really in the soul. Scotus, by contrast, identified with a tradition that explained the efficacy of the sacraments in terms of a covenant made by God.

Sacraments work not because they intrinsically convey grace, as a cause intrinsically contains and conveys its effects (Aquinas), but because God has agreed to be present with his grace when the sacraments are performed; they are conditiones sine quibus not (“conditions without which not”) for the reception of grace. Where Aquinas placed the secondary cause, the sacrament itself, in the foreground, Scotus placed the will of God. Sacraments were efficacious media of grace for both, but for Scotus they were emphatically subordinate to the divine will (Ozment 35).