Aquinas, Enchantment, and the Wonders of Nature

Abstract

Aquinas, Enchantment, and the Wonders of Nature Robert St. Hilaire (bio) Recently, there has been much discussion about how currents of postmodernism and some contemporary trends in religion are “reenchanting” the world, endowing it with (or recovering already within it) a mystery, a wonder, and even a sense of the divine absent in the impersonal and mechanistic rationalism characteristic of modernity.1 From time to time in this conversation, the name of Thomas Aquinas is mentioned. For instance, Alison Milbank discerns behind both G. K. Chesterton’s and J. R. R. Tolkien’s resistance to the cultural disenchantment of their day the essentially Thomistic themes of the otherness and diversity of created being;2 Alister McGrath draws on Aquinas’s doctrine of creation to restore a view of the natural world that inherently points beyond itself to God;3 and Graham Ward detects in postmodern culture a new opportunity for a Christian analogical worldview, one he constructs by relying in part on Aquinas’s Eucharistic theology.4 Yet there is something ironic about these and similar appeals to Aquinas.5 Although his theology is seen as a viable resource for projects of reenchantment (to the extent that such cultural change can be deliberately orchestrated),6 what is consistently overlooked is that [End Page 113] Aquinas himself, living in thirteenth-century Christian Europe, very much belonged to an “enchanted” age. I use the word enchanted here not in any attenuated or metaphorical sense, but as referring to, as Charles Taylor defines it, “the world of spirits, demons, and moral forces which our ancestors lived in.”7 In other words, Aquinas hailed from an era that took quite seriously a wide range of spiritual beings, otherworldly occurrences, and magical powers.8 Should we not ask, then, whether or not any of these sorts of cultural beliefs and presuppositions ever found their way into his writings? And if so, might his opinions on such matters in any way help articulate or encourage today’s movements toward reenchantment? In this article, I have two immediate goals. The first is to show that Aquinas does indeed speculate about what I will call enchanted phenomena, specifically miracles, the worldly activities of angels and demons, magic, fortune-telling, curses, and ghosts, all of which, as we will see, he takes to be realities of his present day.9 In fact, his ideas about such phenomena are abundant in his works, and so, to limit the scope of this investigation, I will confine myself to the Summa theologiae and Summa contra Gentiles, which treat these issues in considerable detail.10 Second, I will demonstrate how Aquinas’s views on enchanted phenomena, taken collectively, shape his teachings on the created world or nature (natura), particularly in regard to the general plan or order God establishes within it. Aquinas holds that inherent in nature is a certain degree of unpredictability, spontaneity, incomprehensibility, and awe. It is an outlook that stems directly from his larger enchanted worldview. If theologians and other scholars are looking for ways in which Aquinas can contribute to contemporary discourse on reenchantment, then his doctrine of nature, I will propose, is one place to start. Beyond these main points, however, there is also a broader claim I wish to make—or at least start to make. Modern Thomists have tended to brush past or completely ignore most of Aquinas’s reflections on enchanted phenomena. To my knowledge, there has been no [End Page 114] comprehensive study that examines how Aquinas’s enchanted world-view informs his theology.11 Perhaps this lacuna reflects a fear of compromising the rationalistic image of Aquinas that first emerged within neo-Scholasticism in the wake of the Enlightenment and that still holds sway among some interpreters.12 I want to suggest, however, that to overlook Aquinas’s teachings on enchanted phenomena risks misunderstanding other aspects of his thought. Toward making this case, I will conclude this article by indicating two areas of his theology where exploring the impact of his enchanted worldview would very likely yield fruitful results. My intention here is not to alienate us from Aquinas’s doctrines or to imply that they must first be “demythologized,” as Rudolf...