If it is possible to describe a book that has survived for nearly eight centuries as a “hidden gem” then St. Thomas’ other Summa, the Summa Contra Gentiles, qualifies. As the name suggests, St. Thomas wrote it as a response to the re-emergence of non-Christian philosophy and the rise of Islam. It is by far his greatest work of apologetics for the Christian faith and in that regard, it remains a preeminent work and an untapped resource for the Church. In the first book, he sets out to show both the existence and nature of the Christian God. In his usual thorough-going manner, he begins by showing how reasonable belief in the Christian God actually is.
Catholics, even down to our own day, are often accused of fideism. Fideism is the view that religious beliefs are settled only by faith and unsupported by reason. To be clear, faith deals with claims that transcend human reason. But they must still be grasped by human reason without doing violence to the human mind and way of thinking. They cannot be “proven” in the scientific sense, but this does not mean there are no objective reasons why we should believe them to be true. In an important early question, St. Thomas declares “that to give assent to the truths of Faith is not foolishness even though they are above reason”.
Objective vs Subjective Reasons
St. Thomas uncovers the objective motivations for belief, that is, why someone should believe, and not so much why an individual does believe. This distinction is rather important because Christianity is often attacked on the basis of subjective motivations for belief. Whether it is Freud’s father longing or Marx’s opium of the masses, St. Thomas has little interest in uncovering why someone believes (as an aside, you will be hard pressed to find another author, who is as prolific as St. Thomas, that uses personal pronouns less). Instead he gives four motives for belief in the truth of Christianity.
First, he speaks of the witness of miracles. Whenever God has spoken those truths that “exceed natural knowledge, He gives visible manifestation to works that surpass the ability of all nature.” St. Thomas is simply repeating the Johannine principle that miracles should be seen as signs. Our Lord and the Apostles would preach a message, and to confirm that message came from God, they manifested a physical sign in the form of some miracle. Public miracles were a regular occurrence in the Early Church because of the need for their strong testimonial power. In our age, St. Thomas says, miracles are not as necessary and so therefore are not as commonplace. Nevertheless, “God does not cease to work miracles through His saints for the confirmation of the faith.” Think of when the Church was an infant in the New World, and how the miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe resulted in the conversion of 10 million people in less than a decade. Or think of the Miracle of the Sun and the promise of protection to Portugal. Or even the Shroud of Turin, the Eucharistic Miracles or the incorruptibility of some of the saints. All of these defy scientific explanation (and not from a lack of trying) and yet serve as great signs of the truth of the Catholic faith.
The second motive of credibility as the Catechism calls them (CCC 156) is the mass conversion to Christianity. In order to be intellectually honest, you must wrestle with the question of how, despite unbelievably humble beginnings, Christianity spread to such epic proportions. To chalk it up to good fortune is not only too hasty of a dismissal, but also unhistorical for four reasons. First, it grew “in the midst of the tyranny of persecutions.” Christianity was illegal for most of its first two and a half centuries. Why would anyone sign up for it, unless it were true? Better yet, why would everyone sign up for it? Conversions came not just from Jews or slaves, but even from the upper classes—“both the simple and most learned, flocked to the Christian faith” St. Thomas says.
Human nature being what it is, there is a tendency to spurn truths that surpass the human intellect. That St. Thomas makes a defense of revelation shows just how true this is. Men are very quick to dismiss those things that they cannot grasp. Not only that, but Christianity teaches that “the pleasures of the flesh should be curbed” and “the things of the word should be spurned.” This is, according to St. Thomas, “the greatest of miracles.”
In an “enlightened” age such as ours, one dominated by the hubris of chronological snobbery, this is most certainly underappreciated. There was no worldly advantage whatsoever to accepting the truths of the Faith. Many men and women gave up everything in order to live as Christians. Perhaps a few would be gullible enough to believe these things, but the Church grew 40% per decade for its first 300 years. We must take seriously the “democracy of the dead” and not think ourselves wiser than the men upon whose shoulders we stand.
The Miracle of the Church
St. Thomas says that the third motive of credibility is related to the first and the fact the need for miracles in our age has been diminished. It has been diminished because the greatest miracle (next to the Resurrection) is the Church herself. One must wrestle with the historical fact of the enduring presence of the Church. Or, as St. Thomas says, it is not necessary that the miracles “be further repeated, since they appear most clearly in their effect,” namely the presence of the Church. Lawrence Feingold makes an argument in the form of a dilemma that further illuminates this point. He says that either the Church spread by miracles, in which case God has confirmed her mission, or it spread without miracles. Even if the latter is true, it would be no less miraculous to have lasted 2000 years. Anyone who immerses themselves in Church history and is unafraid to confront the messy human elements, must quickly conclude that the Church as a merely human institution should have failed long ago. I fear that our own time may, in hindsight, feed this motive of credibility.
The “longevity” argument is often countered by the example of Islam. St. Thomas, mostly by way of anticipation, shows how it is precisely in lacking the motives of credibility, that Islam is shown to be a false religion. Muhammad, St. Thomas says “did not bring forth any signs produced in a supernatural way, which alone fittingly gives witness to divine inspiration.” Secondly, it was spread not by the force of truth, but by the sword. This is not to whitewash Christian history and say that there weren’t any forced conversions, but that it spread despite being at the wrong end of the sword. Islam (again even if there are individual Muslims who sincerely choose Islam) has always spread mainly by force which are “signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants.” Finally, Muhammad lacks the final motive of credibility, prophecy—”Nor do divine pronouncements on the part of preceding prophets offer him any witness.”
The growth of the Church was prophesied both in the New Testament (c.f. Mt 13, 16) and Old Testament (c.f. Dan 2). But most striking is the fact that the Old Testament, a collection of books written over the course of hundreds of years, predicted the coming of Christ. This, if we are to be intellectually honest, cannot be easily dismissed. His arrival was even predicted within a very specific window of time (c.f. Daniel 9).
In closing, we would be remiss if we did not make an important distinction. These motives of credibility are reasons why we should believe in Christian revelation. They clear the way for the infusion of divine Faith, by which we assent to everything God has revealed. Like all of God’s gifts, there is always give and take. He gives, but we must take, and we take not by grasping but by removing the impediments we have erected to the reception of the gift. The motives of credibility help to remove those impediments.