Metaphysics and theology: a summa “for” the Gentiles
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Thomas Aquinas did not simply write a summa “against” the Gentiles (contra Gentiles), but also and above all a summa “for” the Gentiles (pro Gentilibus). Natural reason, the only recourse for Mohammedans and pagans when there is no Scripture in common (by contrast with encounters with Jews and heretics), is not just the vertical location of access to God; it also designates the horizontal topos of a community of humanity capable of bringing us together. “Reason” yesterday (Thomas Aquinas) plays the role of “finitude” today (Heidegger) – namely what makes us “in common”. This is the unique perspective of an apologetics which will no longer be held in a sort of “overhanging transcendence” (Merleau-Ponty), as if the absolute were immediately given. We will then stop opposing “metaphysics” and “theology”, in a supposedly pure and falsely researched discourse. It is to transform tradition rather than to go beyond it that the lesson of the Council of Nicaea (325) invites us. The “that is to say” of the same substance of the Father (homoousios) translates the biblical into Hellenic, rather than trying to get out of Hellenic as such. Thus, the famous “what all call God” (et omnes dicunt Deum) at the end of each of the five ways of Thomas Aquinas indicates less the idol of a conceptual God to be overcome, than the icon of a Rational God who, in his kenosis, also inhabits our own nature to transform it. From theo-logy where “only God speaks well of God” (subjective genitive), we will therefore move on to theo- logy where “man can also, and in part at least, speak of God” (objective genitive). A new relationship between metaphysics and theology is established here, capable of initiating another relationship of the believer to the world.
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