A Welsh Coal Mine and Three Parisian Priests

In the 19th C. there were a lot of philosophers around in Europe. Herbert and Charles in England, Arthur and Friedrich in Germany and a few more. How did they behave? They disagreed with each other, and they tried to state their disagreements very pointedly and perhaps I'm myself an heir to their pointedness at times. But this did not stop the disciples of each to make rhetorical interpreations of their masters, taking their actual words as understatements and psychologically examining what they would have thought if considering this further thing.

If they had lived 300 years earlier, they would have used the Bible for disagreement. They were back then named Martin, Huldrich, Martin, Thomas, John, John and John. Thanks to them, some people who grew up in the area where their disagreements prevailed came to conclude the Bible has no intelligible content, since there are thousands of irreconcilable ways of interpreting it, and each goes about with great attention and has no notion he's contradicting it.

Now, back to the 19th C. Everyone knows, it went on to World War I. And in a novel by Ken Follett, 1914, a few months before Sarajevo shooting, there is an explosion and a fire in a mine in Wales. There is a type of trees and ferns from before the Flood, they were covered by lots of sediment during it 4978 years ago, and the remains of them are labelled Cambrian, because they make so much coal in Wales, and Cambria is Latin for Cymru, which is Welsh for Wales. Now, the coals are not alone, tidy, in the coal mines, there is methane, there is coal dust, and when something goes wrong in a coal mine it can go very wrong.

It can go so wrong, and it is so unpleasant even when all goes right, that free and innocent citizens earlier on were not supposed to do the work, it was reserved for slaves or offenders condemned to slavery.

In Ken Follett's novel, five men die, fifty men are grieveously injored. And King George V hearing of it goes to visit the families who lost a miner. One Ethel Williams, arguably his fiction, had suggested it to the king. And she looks on and says "I never thought I'd see a King knock on a miner's door."

Well - there was another King who did that before George V. Not the least one. He could consider Jupiter or Sirius as small pebbles. He came down to the hut of miners condemned to slavery. Indeed, he went down into the mine too. We celebrate this for the 2021st anniversary in two days, if the world still stands. Before He went back up, He had not just given five gold sovereigns to grieving, He had given five wounds to save miners from the fire. And before He left, He had left us with twelve good and true men, and told them to keep to His teaching.

St. Thomas Aquinas, Bishop Stephen II Tempier of the the Diocese of Paris (it became an archdiocese centuries later) and Duns Scotus were among the heirs of the twelve. Each had made a sacrifice to pefectly serve the One King and to get the attention they didn't spend on worshipping Him on what the miners needed to be safe.

It is inconceivable that they quarrelled like 19th C. philosophers, about as inconceivable as that they should have behaved like the Coal company that negelcted the safety in the 1914 mine explosion, which I think Ken Follett did not make up.

So, while St. Thomas and bishop Tempier disagreed on how and why angels are different persons rather than one, and Scotus agreed with the bishop after he had spoken, they did certainly not make the kind of war on each other that Reformers, 19th C. philosophers, 19th and 20th CC. nationalists would do later on.

St. Thomas spoke up and said, since angels are incorporeal, they differ by being different as ideas, they have different species. It could not be otherwise, and he gave as a parallel, while white objects of matter can be different from each other because of the matter (and for that matter they can so by other qualities than whiteness), the whiteness itself if just one. I think some fashion designers would have rushed to correct him on that one very quickly, if Paris had already had its haute coûture. "Ah no, crêpe de Chine and cray white and snow white are very different!" they would say.

Bishop Tempier was concerned that this idea of incorporeal creatures needing different species of ideas to be different might be considered as a limit on the Omnipotence of God (which St. Thomas was certainly not trying to limit!) and so condemned the idea that God couldn't create different angels unless by making them different species. In addition, he might have been concerned also not to contradict City of God, where St. Ausgustine says that angels and demons were created the same kind. For Thomas, one could say, St. Augustine mainly wanted to deny angels and demons being exactly two kinds, different by moral alignment. For Tempier's conviction, and Scotus' statement, one could say that St. Augustine had in fact said "one kind".

Whatever is to be said for either part, there is nothing to be said for the idea that Bishop Tempier acted with St. Thomas as van Helsing with Dracula, waiting till he had gone to bed and then using a stake through his heart. Very much on the contrary. He carefully walked up to St. Thomas mortal (or written) remains, measured their exact position, and considered that St. Thomas, both by corpulence and by already-having-diedness was not likely to move one inch further up to Doomsday. Then he measured the exact distance of one inch more as outside the fence. Putting St. Thomas safely inside it for eternity. And then a few years later a young Father John (a Franciscan, not a Dominican) set himself very safely in the exact middle of Bishop Tempier's fence and stated God is making angels different by giving them a different thisness. The fence is still there. The 219 condemnations were never retracted. 48 years later, Bishop Stephen III Bourret stated sth like "if Thomas Aquinas wrote something which happened to fall under the condemnation of my predecessor, this ban is now lifted as to the works and sentences of Thomas Aquinas" and after that Pope John XXII canonised him, not just for perfect apostolicity of his doctrine, but also for a life in innocence and for miracles worked after he died. Things God worked on his behalf, like the handkerchiefs touching St. Paul's clothes, or the touch of the Holy Prophet Elisaeus' corpse.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
two days before Christmas
23.XII.2021