Imagine two little boys growing up in their father's household. The older boy enjoys the company of his father. He runs up to his father and hugs him when he gets home from work. He listens to his father even when he's getting disciplined, or when his father tells him to do things he doesn't want to do. He'll complain about things to his father sometimes, and even object to discipline, but the connection is always there.
The other little boy likes to play by himself in his room. What he wants is to be in complete control of things. His father has given him lots of toys, but the toys are all that he's interested in. He's gotten very good at a number of games that he plays with the toys, but they're all play-by-yourself games, and don't involve either his brother or his father. When his father tries to get his attention by bringing him a new toy, the kid just grabs it and slams the door closed.
This image came to my mind while I was reading Edward Feser's Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction. Assuming you know nothing about this topic, let me explain it briefly.
In the Middle Ages, say 1000 to 1400 A. D., the Roman Catholic Church developed not only theological doctrines, but an entire philosophy that explained to the best of their knowledge what the world was about. They started with ancient Greek philosophers, primarily Aristotle (384-322 B. C.), and modified his thought to be compatible with Christianity. Although this work was done by many scholars over centuries, it is generally conceded that it reached its epitome with St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 A. D.). Broadly speaking, the philosophy (as opposed to theology) was known as scholasticism.
Metaphysics (from the Greek "beyond physics") is the study of being, the most fundamental aspects of reality. Scholastic metaphysics is therefore what Aquinas and his cohort thought about the fundamentals of reality.
This topic is virtually unknown today except by specialists, and not many of those, either, which is why I've gone to the trouble to explain it to you. The reason is that, with the advent of modern thought, people like Francis Bacon (1561-1626), David Hume (1711-1776) and others intentionally discarded scholasticism in favor of other ways of thinking about reality, most of which favor the powerful methods of quantitative science, which reduce everything to mathematical models.
Everybody agrees that the scientific and industrial revolutions have made huge differences in our ability to feed, clothe, and care for ourselves—by and large, positive differences. If tomorrow, all physical signs of scientific advancements since 1700 vanished, the vast majority of people on earth would die within weeks, leaving only a few survivalists and primitive hunter-gatherers.
Modern thought is sometimes summarized under the title of the Enlightenment. In this view, the West suffered under the repressive domination of the Church, which stifled intellectual progress, until a few brave souls (e. g. Bacon, Hume, etc.) threw off the chains of darkness and led us into the light of knowledge that we didn't have to concern ourselves with God, and that our own intellects can take us wherever we want to go. C. S. Lewis satirized the arguments sometimes made in favor of the Enlightenment in a book about his intellectual conversion to Christianity, The Pilgrim's Regress. His pilgrim, who refers to God as "the Landlord," encounters a Mr. Enlightenment, and asks him, "But how do you know there is no Landlord?"
Mr. Enlightenment replies, "Christopher Columbus, Galileo, the earth is round, invention of printing, gunpowder!!"
When John asks how this non sequitur applies to his question, Mr. Enlightenment answers "Your people . . . believe in the Landlord because they have not had the benefits of a scientific training."
Whether or not you realize it, everyone growing up in the U. S. has had a "scientific training" simply by existing in the modern world and unconsciously absorbing its assumptions that surround us like the air we breathe. One of these assumptions concerns what is "real," and I won't stop to define that further, because it means just what common sense means by it.
One commonplace notion in which the scientific worldview diverges from scholastic metaphysics is the question of which is more real: your body, or the atoms from which it is made? The modern tendency is to think that atoms, or ultimately quarks, are what physical reality consists of, and everything else is, if not illusion, at the most secondary and not as important somehow.
Feser shows that scholastic metaphysics is not in conflict with scientific knowledge, because modern science is highly limited in the things it can explain using its methods. Essentially, modern science has no metaphysics, so although it is practically useful, it's no good in discovering the ultimate foundations of reality.
On the other hand, scholastic metaphysics says that once the atoms are in your body, you, as a substantial being, are more real than the atoms, which now have only a virtual existence in you. To quote Feser, "The level of basic particles is in no way privileged. The particles are not somehow 'more real' than the substances of which they are parts. On the contrary, it is the substances that are more real insofar [as] the particles, like every other part, exist only virtually rather than actually in the whole."
That little fragment uses scholastic vocabulary that may seem mysterious. But if you read the rest of the book, you can appreciate the grand intellectual structure that scholastic metaphysics is.
What good is it today, though? In a word, sanity. I learned about Feser's book from an online talk by Mary Harrington, who found it invaluable in understanding why modern thought has led to situations such as the transgender movement that previous generations would have considered simply crazy. Such things are the final workings-out of perverse logic set in motion by the abandonment of the (formerly!) common-sense notions about reality that scholastic metaphysics upholds.
You can now guess which little boy is which. Clearly, the one playing alone in his room should at least talk with his brother—and maybe his Father as well.
Sources: Mary Harrington's First Things lecture "Our Crisis is Metaphysical" is available among other locations at https://firstthings.com/our-crisis-is-metaphysical-2026-d-c-lecture/. Edward Feser's Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (2014) is published by editiones scholasticae and distributed in the U. S. by Rutgers University. The quotation from The Pilgrim's Regress is from pp. 24-25 of the Wade Annotated Edition (ed. D. C. Downing), published by Eerdmans in 2014.
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