Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira unhesitatingly defined himself as a convinced Thomist, conforming in this to the Magisterium of the Church that in the last century, from Leo XIII80 to John Paul II,81 never ceased to point to the Doctor Communis Ecclesiae as the point of reference for the philosophical studies of Catholics. Contrary to many neo-Thomists of the twentieth century, anxious to build a bridge between the philosophia perennis and modern thinking,82 the Brazilian thinker always stressed the incompatibility between the philosophy of the being and the orientation of “modern” philosophy, from Descartes83 to Kant, from existentialism to modern nihilism, seeing in this the progressive itinerary of human intelligence towards metaphysical suicide.
The Summa Theologica, that summarizes, according to Pius XII, “the spiritual universe of the greatest genius of the Middle Ages”,84 is for Pius XI, “heaven as seen from earth”.85 Next to St Thomas, whose Summa he knew and widely commented upon, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira placed St Bonaventure,86 whose philosophy has well been described as “the most medieval of the philosophies of the Middle Ages”.87 The Brazilian thinker set out to recompose the vault of that arch of thought which had its two pillars in the two great doctors of the Church, placed by Sixtus V on the same level of holiness of doctrine and of authority of Magisterium: “Hi enim sunt duae olivae et duo candelabra (Apoc. 11:4)”.88
The “sapiential” vision of Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira is linked to the profound and lapidary sentences on “Wisdom” of St Thomas and of St Bonaventure. If the Angelic Doctor affirmed that “Sapientia est ordinare et iudicare”,89 the Seraphic Doctor echoed him by writing that “Sapientia diffusa est in omni re”.90
“Omnia in mensura et numero et pondere disposuisti”,91 recites in its turn the Sacred Scripture. The Belgian philosopher De Bruyne stresses the exceptional importance of this verse on which is based that which defines the “sapiential” aesthetics of the Middle Ages.92 Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, recalls one of his disciples,
“instinctively lived this sapiential aesthetics ever since his first vision of things. He slowly made them explicit until they became the corner stones of the Counter-Revolutionary doctrine, of what he many times called ‘the total image’ of the Counter-Revolution”.93
Dr Plinio invited his disciples to deepen their knowledge of the notion of “analogia entis” and the theory of participation, as well as the cognitive and metaphysical value of the symbol. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira’s vision, like that of the Middle Ages, is that “The world unfolds itself like a vast ensemble of symbols, like a cathedral of ideas. It is the most richly rhythmical conception of the world, a polyphonic expression of eternal harmony”.94 For medieval man nothing exists without meaning: “nihil vacuum neque sine signo apud Deum”95 and everything that exists is made in such a way as to awaken the thought and memory of God. “The glory of the divine model is in every creature (…). Thus, every being is a path that leads to the model, he is a vestige of the wisdom of God”.96
St Bonaventure offers us an itinerary of the soul to God “through the signs” of the sensible world that, with characteristics that are always different and unequal, address us with a single divine appeal. The truth of things consists in showing the supreme truth, the model cause. It is this similarity between the creature and the Creator that consents us to raise ourselves from things to God.97 “The human intellect was created to ascend gradually — like the steps of a ladder — up to the supreme Principle that is God.”98
Among the classical “proofs” of the existence of God, Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira especially appreciates the “fourth way”,99 understanding it however as a method of formation and a psychological process that shapes the human soul, rather than an abstract philosophical syllogism.
The “fourth way” that leads to God, the most perfect being, through the perfections in which all creation, in different measures and degrees, shares is that in which the platonic aspect is greatest. It shows God not just as an efficient cause and a final cause, but also as the model cause of creation and it contemplates the order of creation as a universe of harmony and beauty, a reflection of the uncreated divine Beauty.
“The beauty of God is reflected in the hierarchical and harmonic ensemble of all these beings in such a way that there is not, in a certain sense, a better way of knowing the infinite and uncreated beauty of God than by analysing the finite and created beauty of the universe considered, not so much in each being, but in their ensemble. God is reflected, nonetheless, in a masterpiece that is higher and more perfect than the Cosmos. It is the Mystical Body of Christ, the supernatural society we venerate with the name Holy Roman Catholic, Apostolic Church. She herself constitutes a whole universe of harmonic and variegated aspects that sing and reflect, each in its own way, the holy and ineffable beauty of God and the Word Incarnate. By contemplating the universe, on the one hand, and Holy Mother Church, on the other, we can elevate ourselves to the consideration of the holy, infinite and uncreated beauty of God.”100
Modern philosophy, starting from Kant, has reduced beauty to a purely subjective element. According to the philosophia perennis, the beautiful is rather a transcendental property of the being, that is a perfection that belongs to every thing in as much as it is, without exceptions. Being the property of the being, the pulchrum (the beautiful) is linked with the transcendental attributes of the true, because it likes what is known by the intellect, and of good because the object of the beautiful satisfies the sensitive appetite. The beautiful is the radiance of the true and of good,101 it is indeed a summary of truth and good.102 “Beauty is like a synthesis of transcendental things. Literally, it is the excellence of intelligibility of an object whose parts splendidly in harmony (unity), fascinate the intelligence (truth) and attract desire (good).”103 The beautiful, as St Bonaventure affirms, embraces all causes and is common to them. The glory of God, ultimate end of man and of history is the contemplation of his Beauty, and it is what constitutes the happiness of man. If, indeed, the soul, knowing the true, moves towards the end that is the divine Good, it does so with even greater enthusiasm when it perceives God through the beauty of things created. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira was an ardent champion of the “beautiful” as a weapon of the Counter-Revolution of the twentieth century.
If it is true that the pulchrum is another name for the verum (the true) and for the bonum (the good), its replacement with the horridum (the horrendous) is only one aspect, one that is more insidious because it is less noticed, of that process of destruction of every quality of the Being that characterizes the Revolution. The hatred of the Revolutionary forces for human beauty, the image of divine beauty, is shown in this love for the horrendous. The Revolution wants to destroy every form of pulchrum in the life of man to make it more difficult, if not impossible, to reach God through his creatures.
Notes:
80. Leo XIII may be considered the promoter of the rebirth of Thomism in modern times, with the encyclical Aeterni Patris of 4 August 1879, in which he declared St. Thomas to be the sole official teacher in the Catholic schools of every level. On this important document, Cf. Various authors, Le ragioni del tomismo. Dopo il centenario dell’enciclica “Aeterni Patris”, Milan, Edizioni Ares, 1979.
81. John Paul II, “Il Centenario dell’Aeterni Patris”, Speech given at the Angelicum on 18 November 1979, L’Osservatore Romano, 19-20 November 1979.
82. Cf. for example Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges O.P., Saint Thomas d’Aquin, 4th edn., Paris, Alcan, 1925. An extreme case of deviation from Thomism, through the assumption of the apriori of Kant and of the existentialism of Heidegger is that of the Jesuit Karl Rahner (Geist im Welt, 1st edn., Innsbruck, Rauch, 1939) clearly denounced by the Stigmatine father Cornelio Fabro in La svolta antropologica di Karl Rahner, Milan, Rusconi, 1974. Of Fr Fabro, Catolicismo published in 1963 an article, translated by the Osservatore Romano, in which the author stressed the impossibility of establishing a bridge between true Christian philosophy, which can never deny the notion of divine transcendence, and the modern philosophical schools founded on the “principle of immanence”, C. Fabro C.P.S., “Filosofia moderna e pensamento cristão”, Catolicismo, no. 151, July 1963, p. 6.
83. On the abandonment of the metaphysical in modern thinking, C. Fabro, C.P.S., Introduzione all’ateismo moderno, 2 vols., Rome, Studium, 1969; Tomas Tyn, O.P., Metafisica della sostanza. Partecipazione e analogia entis, (Bologna, Edizioni Studio Domenicano, 1991), pp. 243-384.
84. Pius XII, Speech of 25 September 1949, in DR, vol. XI, p. 217.
85. Pius XI, Address to the Angelicum of 12 December 1924, in Xenia Thomistica, Rome, 1925, vol. III, p. 600.
86. On this aspect of the philosophy of St Bonaventure, Cf. J. M. Bissen, O.F.M., L’exemplarisme divin selon Saint Bonaventure, Paris, Vrin, 1929; Gilson, Le philosophie de Saint Bonaventure, Paris, Vrin, 1953; Efrem Bettoni O.F.M., San Bonaventura di Bagnoregio, Milan, Biblioteca Francescana, 1973; Francesco Corvino, Bonaventura da Bagnoregio francescano e pensatore, Bari, Dedalo, 1980.
87. Thus Jacques Guy Bougerol O.F.M., at the end of the congress on St Bonaventure of Rome, on 26 September 1974, cit. in Leonardo Piazza, Mediazione simbolica in San Bonaventura, (Vicenza, Edizioni L.I.E.F., 1978), p. 65.
88. Sixtus V, Bull Triumphantis Jerusalem.
89. St Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica, I, 1, a. 6, c.; q. 79, a. 10, ad 3.
90. St Bonaventure, Hexäemeron, col. 2, 21 (V, 340 a).
91. “But Thou hast ordered all things in measure, and number and weight” (Wisd. 11:21).
92. Edgar de Bruyne, L’esthétique du Moyen Age, (Louvain, Editions de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1947), p. 11. Cf. also ID., Etudes d’esthétique médiévale, 3 vols., Brugge, De Tempel, 1946. “Under whatever aspect we consider it, there exists in reality but one mediaeval vision of the world, whether it expresses itself in works of art or in defined philosophical concepts: that, namely, which St. Augustine drew with a masterhand in his De Trinitate, and which is directly referable to the words of the Book of Wisdom (11:21): omnia in mensura, et numero, et pondere disposuisti.” E. Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, (Notre Dame-London, University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), p.101.
93. Miguel Beccar Varela, Letter to the author.
94. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1965. “Medieval man effectively lived in a world populated with meanings, connections, supernatural senses, manifestations of God in things, in a nature that continuously spoke in a heraldic language (…) because it was the sign of a superior truth. (…) In its symbolic vision, nature, even in its most fearful aspects, becomes the alphabet with which the Creator speaks to us of the order of the world, of the supernatural goods, of the steps to be taken to move in the world in an orderly way to acquire the heavenly prizes. (…) Early Christianity had educated to the symbolic translation of the principles of faith.” Umberto Eco, Arte e bellezza nell’estetica medievale, (Milan, Bompiani, 1978), pp. 68-9. A fresco of the medieval symbolic cosmos is painted by Marie- Madeleine Davy in Initiation à la symbolique romaine, Paris, Flammarion, 1977.
95. St Ireneus, Adversus haereses, books V, IV, c. 2.
96. St Bonaventure, Hexäemeron, col. 12, nn. 14-15.
97. This likeness, as Etienne Gilson observes, does not imply a participation of things in the essence of “The real likeness that exists between the Creator and his creatures is a likeness of expression. Things are to God as signs are to the meaning that they express; they are therefore a sort of language and the entire universe is only a book in which everywhere one reads the Trinity”. E. Gilson, La philosophie au Moyen Age, (Paris, Payot, 1952), p. 442.
98. St Bonaventure, Breviloquium, p. 2, c. 12 (V, 230 a).
99. “Quarta via sumitur ex gradibus qui in rebus inveniuntur”. Of all the Thomist proofs, as Gilson observes, the fourth is that which has caused the greatest number of different interpretations (E. Gilson, Le thomisme, (Paris, Vrin, 1972), p. 82). C. Fabro C.P.S., “Sviluppo, significato e valore della IV via”, Doctor Communis, no. 7, 1954, pp. 71-109; ID., “Il fondamento metafisico della quarta via”, Doctor Communis”, no. 18, 1965, pp. 49-70, now both in L’uomo e il rischio di Dio, (Rome, Studium, 1967), pp. 226-71.
100. P. Corrêa de Oliveira, “O Escapulário, a Profissão e a Consagração interior”, speech at the 3rd National Congress of the Carmelite Tertiary Order (São Paulo, 14-16 November 1958), Mensageiro do Carmelo, special edition of 1959.
101. Cf. Leo J. Elders, La metafisica dell’essere di san Tommaso d’Aquino in una prospettiva storica, It. tr., (Vatican City, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1995), vol. I, p. 167. On the “pulchrum” in St Thomas, Cf. Summa Theologica, I, q. 5, a. 4; I, q. 39, a. 8; I-IIae, q. 27, a. 1 to 3.
102. “Beauty in created order is the splendour of all the transcendents united, of the being, of the one, of the true and of the good; or, to be more precise it is the splendour of a harmonious unity of proportion in the integrity of the parts (splendor, proportio, integritas, Cf. I, q. 39, a. 8)” (R. Garrigou-Lagrange O.P., Perfections divines, (Paris, Beauchesne, 1936), p. 299.
103. François-Joseph Thonnard A.A., Précis de Philosophie, (Tournai, Desclée, 1966), p. 1227.