H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA -- LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: SORDI

 G.: Let us begin with Sordi’s club, because every Thomist eventually behaves as if Aquinas had founded not merely a school but a species of admission society. S.: A club with better Latin than most clubs, though not always better wine. G.: Quite. And the irony, of course, is that Thomas died without the advantage of official sainthood, which may have done him more good than immediate canonisation would have done. S.: Because he was still available as a thinker before becoming fully available as an altar-piece. G.: Exactly. There is a small interval in which a dead theologian remains a philosopher. Once the halo arrives, readers become tempted to genuflect where they ought to distinguish. S.: Then Sordi, as Jesuit custodian, is trying to keep the distinctions alive while still enjoying the halo. G.: Very well put. He wants Aquinas both as sound philosophy and as counter-revolutionary bulwark, which is a difficult double office. S.: And one that Oxford receives rather differently. G.: Entirely. Oxford, being Anglican, classicising, and institutionally allergic to papal enthusiasm, can accept Aquinas as a formidable mind without ever quite joining the devotional queue. S.: Hence Kenny. G.: Yes, hence Kenny, who is almost the ideal English case: former seminarian, real philosopher, trained enough in the tradition to read Thomas from inside, detached enough from institutional piety to teach him as philosophy rather than merely as doctrine. S.: So Kenny helps Aquinas survive translation into Oxford. G.: He does. He lets Aquinas enter the room not as the Angelic Doctor under glass, but as a serious disputant on act and potency, essence and existence, intention, will, law, virtue, and the rest. S.: Yet the saintliness does not disappear. G.: No, but it becomes biographically secondary rather than pedagogically primary. Which is probably as Aquinas would have preferred, though one should never ascribe modesty too confidently to a Dominican. S.: A useful rule. G.: Now, Bonaventure. S.: Or should one say Giovanni di Fidanza, which already sounds like the beginning of a problem. G.: Exactly. Bonaventure is philosophically suspicious to me because the name-change itself smells faintly of pre-sanctified literary arrangement. S.: Harsh. G.: Dry rather than harsh. Thomas remains Thomas of Aquino. Bonaventure enters philosophy under an already elevated title. S.: Though to be fair, the title is historical enough. G.: No doubt. But names matter. Fidanza is a proper mortal name. Bonaventura already means that Providence is doing the publicity. S.: Whereas Aquino is merely locative. G.: Precisely. A place-name. About as sober as one could hope. “Thomas from Aquino” sounds almost administrative compared with “Bonaventure.” S.: So you suspect saints with uplifting names. G.: I suspect philosophy’s reception when names begin flattering the doctrine before one has read a page. S.: Then Aquinas benefited from dying first and shining later. G.: Very much so. Death before sainthood gave his work a period of intellectual circulation in which it could be disputed, appropriated, mistrusted, admired, and used without immediate liturgical suffocation. S.: And by the time canonisation comes, the philosophy is already too large to be reduced to sanctity. G.: Exactly. The Summa and the commentaries have already escaped the shrine. S.: Which is not true of every saintly thinker. G.: Not true at all. Many are canonised before they are read, and after that their philosophy becomes a species of ecclesiastical furniture. S.: You really do resent canonised furniture. G.: I resent all furniture that starts calling itself self-evident. Now, Sordi wants Aquinas as the sound philosophy needed to preserve religious and social order. S.: Which immediately moves the thing from university debate into cultural programme. G.: Yes. Aquinas becomes not only a thinker but an instrument of restoration, which has pedagogic force but also risks using Thomas as a banner rather than as a mind. S.: Yet the comparative method Sordi favours seems philosophically serious. He sets Aquinas against rationalists and empiricists to show the deficiencies of the latter. G.: Quite. That part I admire more. Comparison at least gives Aquinas opponents worthy of him and keeps scholasticism from becoming mere repetition. S.: So Sordi modernises method while conserving doctrine. G.: Precisely. He does not just chant medieval formulas. He drags Thomas into combat with modern errors, which is at least more philosophical than reverential paraphrase. S.: Though you do not like the social restoration part. G.: I dislike any philosophy that begins sounding like a police recommendation, yes. S.: That will not help your Jesuit reception. G.: My Jesuit reception is poor already. Still, Aquinas in Sordi’s hands becomes a club principle: one belongs to the community of reason by belonging, in effect, to the intellectual order of Thomas. S.: Hence the “club of Aquino.” G.: Yes. A durable intellectual community underwritten by common metaphysics. Very unlike my own thinner, more procedural notion of conversational reason. S.: Because for you people can reason together without first sharing a full metaphysical picture. G.: Exactly. They need only enough common ground, enough inferential trust, enough practical rationality. Sordi thinks reason itself must be stabilised by shared doctrine and institutional continuity. S.: And perhaps he is not wholly wrong, if one is speaking of civilisation rather than single exchanges. G.: A fair caution. At the civilisational level, institutions do stabilise discourse. My complaint is only that one should not make metaphysical club-membership a precondition of intelligibility. S.: Oxford prefers public reasons to doctrinal fraternity. G.: At its best, yes. Though Oxford also has clubs disguised as reason. S.: Naturally. Now, how does Sir Thomas More enter this saintly parade? G.: Ah yes, poor More. An English martyr, canonised by Rome, admired by Anglicans with careful discomfort, quoted by politicians, and misused by nearly everyone. S.: Was he made a saint? Yes, by the Roman Catholics. G.: Certainly. Canonised in 1935, which already tells one something about modern uses of old martyrdom. S.: And the Church of England? G.: More complicated. The Church of England may honour him liturgically in certain calendars or ecumenical moods, but without the Roman machinery of canonisation in quite the same sense. Anglicans are good at admiring Roman saints while pretending not to notice the Roman paperwork. S.: So More is a saint in one church, an heroic conscience in another, and an awkward statesman in every history seminar. G.: Exactly. Which makes him philosophically useful and institutionally inconvenient. S.: The Italians like him? G.: Italians like everyone once a text can be translated and a conscience dramatized. But More never belongs to Italy the way Aquinas does. He is received, not inherited. S.: Whereas Thomas belongs to Italy before he belongs to Rome. G.: Good. Aquino is geographically, intellectually, and philologically Italian before being ecclesiastically universal. S.: And that helps his philosophical reputation. G.: Immensely. One can read him as an Italian thinker, a Dominican, a scholastic, a metaphysician, a commentator on Aristotle, a theologian, and only then as Saint Thomas, in that order if one is healthy. S.: While Bonaventure arrives already half-canon in the sound of his name. G.: Exactly. And that is why I am mean about him. S.: You are rarely mean without principle. G.: Thank you. My principle here is that philosophy profits from late sanctification, if sanctification must come at all. S.: So the ideal schedule is: write hugely, die, circulate, dispute, be attacked, be appropriated, influence universities, and only then be sainted when it no longer matters too much. G.: Splendid. Yes. That would preserve both the shrine and the seminar. S.: Aquinas nearly got that. G.: Nearly enough. The philosophical body had already escaped the hagiographical envelope. S.: And Oxford could then receive him through Aristotle as much as through Rome. G.: Precisely. That is crucial. Thomas enters Oxford not because Oxford wants saints, but because Oxford wants Aristotle explained by someone with terrifying competence. S.: Hence the long life of Thomism in odd English forms. G.: Yes. Not always devotional Thomism, often rather anti-devotional. One can be deeply interested in Thomas’s metaphysics and still remain temperamentally Anglican, sceptical, or even cheerfully secular. S.: Kenny again. G.: Kenny, certainly. Also Anscombe at certain points, and others who found in Thomas a grammar of intention, action, law, and virtue strong enough to survive confessional thinning. S.: Bonaventure fares worse there. G.: Much worse. He is too illuminated, too affective, too seraphic for the average Oxford appetite. His thought may be rich, but it carries too much atmosphere for a place that likes furniture with straight lines. S.: Whereas Thomas can be made to look almost administrative. G.: Exactly. He is saintly by metaphysical bulk, not by mystical perfume. S.: You should not say that in a Franciscan house. G.: I should say nothing in a Franciscan house if I can help it. Now, what has Sordi against modernism? S.: Everything, I should think. Fragmentation, empiricism, sensism, thinning of metaphysical order, and the modern tendency to imagine that conversation can survive without common first principles. G.: Very good. For him, Aquinas is not merely one thinker among others but the organiser of a durable intellectual commonwealth. S.: Which is why you call it a club. G.: Yes. The club is not frivolous. It is an order of discourse in which shared assumptions make rational exchange stable. S.: Then perhaps one should not mock Sordi too quickly. He is trying to explain how communities of reason are kept alive. G.: True. My resistance is only to the suggestion that the community must already agree on full metaphysical furniture before any real conversational reason can occur. S.: You prefer lighter luggage. G.: Exactly. My travellers need intentions, recognitions, norms of cooperation, not necessarily the whole Summa packed into their cases. S.: Yet there are cases where the Summa helps. G.: Of course. On action, intention, double effect, law, virtue, natural teleology, Thomas is not merely respectable but indispensable. S.: And Sordi would add social order. G.: Naturally. He wants Thomas as the foundation for social restoration, which is where I begin reaching for the door. S.: Because restoration often means other people’s freedom quietly tidied away. G.: Yes. Philosophies of order always risk making liberty sound like bad filing. S.: Still, in the case of patria, church, and school, Thomas often looks less like a tyrant and more like a patient classifier. G.: Quite. Which is why he is teachable. His distinctions are often humane because they are slow. S.: That is a beautiful sentence. G.: Keep it and make it look as if Sordi thought it first. S.: He may have. Then tell me: did sainthood distort Thomas’s reception at Oxford or help it? G.: Both, in different rooms. It distorted him for those who wanted him as doctrinal authority merely. It helped him by guaranteeing preservation, commentary, and institutional seriousness. But Oxford ultimately took what it wanted from Thomas because the thought was too good to leave to the saints. S.: And the Italians? G.: The Italians had two temptations: either to sanctify him into pious marble, or to nationalise him into a philosophical ancestor of order. Sordi, I think, hovers between the two without collapsing wholly into either. S.: Because he still compares Aquinas with modern philosophers. G.: Exactly. Comparative method keeps the club from becoming purely liturgical. S.: Though Taparelli and the Jesuit compendia pull the other way. G.: They do. Standardisation is always both a pedagogic benefit and an intellectual risk. Once Thomas becomes the approved manual, one can stop reading Thomas and start reading Thomism. S.: Which is often death by commentary. G.: Very often. Commentary is excellent until it becomes the only thing one is allowed to admire. S.: That danger exists for saints more than for ordinary philosophers. G.: Much more. Saints attract piety before they attract scrutiny. Thomas survives because he is too difficult, too systematic, and too philosophically fecund to remain merely an object of cult. S.: Bonaventure does not quite survive in the same way. G.: No. He survives more selectively, where people want illumination, exemplarism, Augustinian interiority, Franciscan warmth, or spiritual metaphysics. But he never quite becomes the common philosophical currency Thomas became. S.: Because Fidanza became Bonaventura too soon? G.: If not historically, then acoustically, yes. S.: You are impossible. G.: I am merely phonologically suspicious. Names predispose reception. “Aquinas” sounds like a location; “Bonaventure” sounds like a sermon title. S.: That is unjust and very funny. G.: Good. Keep both qualities together. Now, More again. Does his sainthood help or hinder philosophical reception? S.: Mostly hinder, perhaps, if one is after political argument rather than conscience theatre. G.: Yes. More is too easily flattened into martyrdom and thereby rescued from the tedious difficulty of his political thought and historical conduct. S.: Whereas Thomas is so large that sainthood cannot flatten him entirely. G.: Precisely. One saint is absorbed by his halo; the other irradiates beyond it. S.: Then Sordi’s real contribution is to keep Aquinas as intellectual organizer rather than merely devotional ancestor. G.: Yes. That is his strength. He makes Thomas do contemporary work against empiricism and modern disintegration. Whether one likes the social programme is another matter. S.: But one can at least see why he matters for an Italian “Aquinas renaissance.” G.: Very much so. He helps move Thomas from the edge of ecclesiastical memory back to the centre of intellectual life. S.: And Oxford receives that through different conduits. G.: Through philosophers, translators, ex-seminarians, classicists, moralists, and those who discovered that analytic distinctions did not forbid theological intelligence. S.: So perhaps Aquinas’s best fortune was to be born local, think universal, die a friar, and become a saint only after philosophers had already started stealing him. G.: That is excellent. Yes. Philosophical theft before canonical enclosure. S.: Then your final verdict on saints and philosophy? G.: Saints are dangerous to philosophy when reverence arrives too early. Philosophy survives saints when the thought has already learned to travel without the relics. S.: And Aquinas? G.: A triumph of travel over relic. S.: Bonaventure? G.: A beautiful problem under an overhelpful name. S.: More? G.: A martyr too quickly moralised for the comfort of historians and too English to remain wholly Roman. S.: Sordi? G.: A club secretary of genius, provided one does not let him lock the door. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Piacentine, with one Dominican lamp still burning.