DYK? St. Thomas of the Creator

Did you know that Chesterton, Pieper, and Ratzinger all bestowed this title on St. Thomas because it is a theme that runs throughout his work?

Aug 28, 2024

In my research to understand the theology and philosophy of creation, I came across a recurring title for St. Thomas Aquinas that I had never heard before, that of St. Thomas of the Creator. I tried to trace the chronology, and I believe it started with G. K. Chesterton. It sounds like something he would write. I was excited to discover that three of my favorite authors used this title. I found the title in Josef Pieper’s and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s writing as well.

I have three things to say before sharing this compilation of sources.

I write to teach, so stick with me. I teach because the subject matter excites me. I want to show you what I found because I think it matters to our lives and how we understand science, philosophy, and theology. If something doesn’t make sense, message or comment (below). Let me know.
These sources are background to my previous post: “Are You Infected with Materialism?” This essay explains, in part, why Aristotelian natural philosophy is important for Aquinas and for the theology of creation.
I give you links to free books! I absolutely love Archive.org and recommend to my students and to you that you set up an account. So many great works are available there. All my sources in the following essay are linked. You would spend well over $100 buying these, so consider donating to Archive.org.

G. K. Chesterton’s St. Thomas Aquinas

In Chesterton’s 1933 so-named sketch of the life of St. Thomas Aquinas, he bestows upon the great Angelic Doctor of the Catholic Church this new title, “St. Thomas of the Creator” (Chesterton, 141). He gives this title at the end of a story, masterfully told as only Chesterton can, about Aquinas’s compulsion to fight heresy with skilled exposition and detailed argument. Aquinas, he says, preferred the solitude of study and writing, but once found himself bound by friarly obedience in attendance at a feast in the court of King Louis IX of France (Chesterton, 115). Silent and preoccupied with his thoughts for most of the lively affair, Aquinas suddenly slammed his fist on the table and shocked the party by exclaiming, “And that will settle the Manichees!” King Louis knew and respected Aquinas’s scholarship, so he instructed his secretaries to go sit beside the absent-minded friar and assist him in recording the argument that had just occurred to him.

The Manichæn heresy was a serious one dating back a millennium before Aquinas’s time. It was the result of an Iranian religion founded by Mani in the third century A.D. that claimed to be based on pure reason instead of faith. The Manichees taught a dualistic cosmology of good and evil that inhabited the realms of lightness and darkness (Catholic Encyclopedia). The teaching involved caricatures of Christianity, such as Adam, Eve, and Jesus Christ, as actors embroiled in the fight to redeem the light from the darkness. The aim of individual Manichæn life was the same, to set the light-substance free by avoiding things like meat, wine, sex, trade, possessions, and all such pleasures which were dark-substances degraded by matter. Spiritual things were thought to be subject to the divine power, but corporeal things, including the human body, subject to the power of darkness and evil. Chesterton does not say exactly what Aquinas dictated to King Louis’s scribes to strike a blow to the Manichees that day, but refutations and references to the Manichees are found throughout Aquinas’s works. (For example, see ST.I.8.3 on “Whether God is everywhere by essence, presence and power?”) The refutation in its most fundamental form is the theology of creation, that God is in all things by His power.

Chesterton says, “It was Aquinas who baptised Aristotle, when Aristotle could not have baptised Aquinas.” (Chesterton, 137). What he means is that Thomistic philosophy elevated Aristotelian thought. Aquinas follows Aristotelian natural philosophy because it 1) begins with what is evident to the senses and 2) works through the study of motion and change to discover the forms of natural beings. The concept of being is critical. There is no formless matter. And for composite bodies in the material realm, there is no matterless form. Matter and form are united in being. For Aristotle, beings have in themselves a source of motion and growth, an “innate impulse of change” (Physics, II, 1, 192b30, Sachs, 49). Thus, natural things are so designed intrinsically as composites of matter and form. Where Aristotle regarded nature as cause, Aquinas went further in the light of divine revelation and identified God as the cause; that is, he recognized God as the Creator.

In baptising Aristotle’s thought, so to speak, the formula for Aquinas’s theology of creation establishes what Catholics pray in the Creed and what Genesis 1:1 codifies: God is the Creator of everything.

Here’s the significance: Creation cannot be partial, as if God forgets to design part of nature and some other deity comes along and finishes what God began. Thus, the Aristotelian understanding of intrinsic design is the only reasonable conclusion. Extrinsic design cannot explain why natural bodies move and change internally as they do. Unlike the Manichees, the senses and the sensations of the body are revered in this view because they are human nature and humans need them for discovering nature. As Chesterton aptly expresses, “When once Christ had risen, it was inevitable that Aristotle should rise again” (Chesterton, 140). Just as surely as God chose to become incarnate in a manger, grow up in a family, catch fish in a sea, and die on a cross, the human experience is lived as bodies interacting with an intelligible world.

You can read Chesterton’s 1933 book here: St. Thomas Aquinas.

Joseph Pieper’s The Silence of St. Thomas

In 1957, Josef Pieper expands on the name, St. Aquinas of the Creator, in a collection of essays titled The Silence of St. Thomas. Pieper speculates that a teaching so pervasive in Aquinas’s thought perhaps has been taken for granted in modern philosophy and theology, like an “unexpressed assumption” rather than an explicitly formulated solution, something that must be read between the lines (Pieper, 47). Pieper says that “the notion of creation determines and characterizes the interior structure of nearly all the basic concepts in St. Thomas’s philosophy of Being” (Pieper, 47-48) He emphasizes the significance of understanding creatures as composite beings with intrinsic design, an all-or-none proposition. Anything less is heresy, and Aquinas never once moved from this position in his works, while false philosophies have fallen to the wayside throughout history.

Pieper clarifies the formulation. Everything is either Creator or creation. It follows that everything is, therefore, creatively thought by the Creator, that for something to be true and real means that it is creatively thought (Pieper, 49). The essence of things, therefore, is fashioned by God, literally not figuratively, so that created things are from the mind of God, as a word is the outer expression of inner thought. All of natural and supernatural existence are God’s expression. Nothing that exists can be otherwise. Things have natures because “createdness determines the entirely and all-pervasively the inner structure of the creature” (Pieper, 47). This is what St. Thomas means when he repeatedly refers to the truth that God is in all things and that nature cannot be evil, contra Manichænism et al. It also follows that such a universe can only be thoroughly rational and good. Evil enters because of the free will of rational creatures, not because of material. There have been many philosophies and theologies that follow the dualism of the Manichæns.

You can read Pieper’s 1957 book here: The Silence of St. Thomas.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s In the Beginning

In 1995, thirty-eight years after Pieper’s book and sixty-two years after Chesterton’s, Pope Benedict XVI (then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) published a short compilation of four homilies under the title, In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall. In an appendix essay, he warns his audience about the consequences of a lack of faith in creation, again invoking Chesterton’s title, St. Thomas of the Creator (Ratzinger, 79). He calls it “faith” in creation in recognition of Aquinas’s baptism of Aristotelian natural philosophy.

Benedict notes that Aquinas’s intellectual penetration of faith in creation is a fulfillment of the Aristotelian inheritance and laments that this theme has not been central to the theological thought of his contemporaries, especially regarding Darwinian evolution. In debates between secular science and variations of Christian theology, it seems as if the theology of creation—that God is Creator of all that is visible and invisible in Heaven and Earth—is all but forgotten. Through whatever mechanism the diversity of life emerged, nature is still God’s creation.

To regain the correct path, Pope Benedict traces key points in the suppression of faith in creation in modern thought, starting with the Renaissance (Ratzinger, 83). This period is marked by a return to Greek thought but not the unity that St. Aquinas found with Aristotle’s concept of being and essence. Giordano Bruno’s philosophy of a divine cosmos was a return to pantheism and therefore a rejection of creation. A universe that is divine, he thought, was free of contingency, independent, and powerful and had no need of the dependence implied by faith. In such a universe, he thought man is liberated, as if to be created means to be imprisoned.

Galileo, likewise and somewhat surprisingly, was responsible for a reversion to mathematics and Platonic thought. He coined the phrase that God wrote the “Book of Nature” analogous to how God wrote scripture. Indeed, the mathematization of the motion of objects is the change that marks the beginning of the scientific revolution, and this change was born of a Christian confidence in an ordered cosmos. Galileo’s view went too far, though, and knowledge of God came to mean knowledge of mathematical structures, which in turn led to ideas that the objects of science are something other than creation. Natural science was regarded as objective, concrete, and examinable, philosophy and theology as subjective, private, and arbitrary. God came to be regarded as a scientific hypothesis. From there, Benedict recounts the divide between science and religion through the reactions of Luther, Hegel, Sartre, and Marx.

Pope Benedict concludes his essay by calling for a return to faith in creation as a way to bring Christians back to covenant with God. “Christian love presupposes faith in the Creator” (Ratzinger, 95) It is a basic decision, he says, about being human. We are dependent because we are created for communion with each other and with God, and there is nothing degrading about this essence of our being. Likewise, faith in creation necessitates faith in redemption. Only a God who remains in His creation can love His creatures and draw them back to Himself.

You can read Ratzinger’s 1995 book here: In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall.

For Us Today

To return to Chesterton’s sentiments, it is only in this larger view that the human person can stand in the universe, gaze upon it with gratitude, and study its mysteries with reverence, in praise of life, in praise of being, and in praise of the handiwork of God in all its goodness and glory (Chesterton, 121). Creation is the very air we breathe. In this respect, we are all like St. Thomas.

We are “of the Creator.” This seems to me key to beginning to understand God and elements. We are not just outside it all, thinking about God and elements. We are God’s creation, and our own bodies and brains are made of God’s elements.

Sources and Links (ICYMI)

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiæ. Trans. Laurence Shapcote. Ed. The Aquinas Institute. At aquinas.cc.

Arendzen, John. “Manichæism.” The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 9. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910. At www.newadvent.org/cathen/09591a.htm.

Aristotle. Physics: A Guided Study. Trans. Joe Sachs. Ed. Harvey M. Flaumenhaft. London: Rutgers University Press, 1995. At archive.org/details/aristotlesphysic0000sach.

Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger). In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995. At archive.org/details/inbeginningcatho0000bene.

Chesterton, G. K. St. Thomas Aquinas. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1933. At archive.org/details/stthomasaquinas0000gkch.

Pieper, Josef. The Silence of St. Thomas: Three Essays. Trans. John Murray and Daniel O’Connor. New York: Pantheon Books, 1957. At archive.org/details/silenceofstthoma0000piep.