History
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas was a prominent medieval philosopher and theologian known for his synthesis of Christian theology with Aristotelian philosophy. His most famous work, "Summa Theologica," sought to reconcile faith and reason, shaping the development of Western thought. Aquinas' emphasis on natural law and the compatibility of faith and reason had a profound impact on the fields of philosophy, theology, and ethics.
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9 Key excerpts on "Thomas Aquinas"
eBook - ePubOn the Medieval Structure of Spirituality
Thomas Aquinas
- Roger Haight, Alfred Pach, Amanda Avila Kaminski, Roger Haight, Alfred Pach, Amanda Avila Kaminski(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Fordham University Press(Publisher)
As a consequence, this introduction follows a somewhat serpentine route to the texts presented in this volume. We begin with the renaissance in the High Middle Ages in Europe, the formation of the universities, and the jolt that the discovery of Aristotle gave to intellectual life. Thomas Aquinas is the child and a leading mediator of the transitions of this period. Understanding his work requires close attention to the new methods of learning that were occurring in the thirteenth century and the intellectual language that Aristotle provided. He introduced some basic ideas and terms that governed a more critical way of thinking. Only then can we turn to a brief explanation of the subject matter of these texts: Thomas’s theology of grace, the nature and role of virtues in human life, and the idea of natural law that became so closely associated with Catholic spirituality. It should be clear that what Aquinas represents in these writings is a foundational map, a metaphysics, of the Christian life.Europe, the University, and Aristotle
Thomas Aquinas wrote a massive synthesis that organized a Christian self-understanding into a genuine worldview. It became a standard for the theology of the schools. Some of its basic ideas live on and are taken for granted. But they first surfaced in a world as different from our own as Aquinas’s was from Augustine’s. The new Medieval culture cannot be represented in a few pages, but it has to be acknowledged; and the elementary concepts of the new Aristotelian language have to be described. In lieu of a history of Western Europe, what follows points to the economic, social, and cultural dynamisms of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the new position of the church in Western Europe, and the influence of the university and Aristotle on theology during the thirteenth century.2Europe and the church.
eBook - PDFOn the Medieval Structure of Spirituality
Thomas Aquinas
- Roger Haight, Alfred Pach, Amanda Avila Kaminski, Roger Haight, Alfred Pach, Amanda Avila Kaminski(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Fordham University Press(Publisher)
Understanding his work requires close attention to the new methods of learning that were occurring in the thirteenth century and the intellectual language that Aristotle provided. He introduced some basic ideas and terms that governed a more critical way of thinking. Only then can we turn to a brief explanation of the subject matter of these texts: Thomas’s INTRODUCTION TO Thomas Aquinas AND THE TEXTS 5 theology of grace, the nature and role of virtues in human life, and the idea of natural law that became so closely asso- ciated with Catholic spirituality. It should be clear that what Aquinas represents in these writings is a foundational map, a metaphysics, of the Christian life. Europe, the University, and Aristotle Thomas Aquinas wrote a massive synthesis that organized a Christian self-understanding into a genuine worldview. It became a standard for the theology of the schools. Some of its basic ideas live on and are taken for granted. But they first surfaced in a world as different from our own as Aquinas’s was from Augustine’s. The new Medieval culture cannot be represented in a few pages, but it has to be acknowledged; and the elementary concepts of the new Aristotelian language have to be described. In lieu of a history of Western Europe, what follows points to the economic, social, and cultural dynamisms of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the new position of the church in Western Europe, and the influence of the university and Aristotle on theology during the thir- teenth century. 2 Europe and the church. The year 1000 can be used as an approximation of when many dimensions of cultural life began to converge into an extensive drift in Western Europe. More regional order meant it was easier to travel; increased travel energized commerce between regions; more business meant more wealth and development in town life. Church historians document an expansion and reform of monastic life as taking off in the tenth and eleventh centuries.
eBook - PDF- Julius Rudolf Weinberg(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
C H A P T E R I X • T H E P H I L O S O P H Y O F A Q U I N A S HOMAS A Q U I N A S is the single most significant philosopher-theologian of the latter part of the thirteenth century. H e was regarded, even by opponents such as Siger of Brabant, as one of the outstanding philosophers of the time. The assignment to him of the task of composing the Summa Contra Gentiles by the General of the Dominican Order, the Opuscula 'written for Pope Urban I V , the letters in answer to requests from theologians and laymen—all attest to high regard for his person and authority. To this must certainly be added the most important fact that his main theological Summae are perhaps the most successful attempts made in the Middle Ages to produce an integrated system of Christian philosophical theology. Though we are here interested only in his philosophy, it cannot be too strongly emphasized that Aquinas was first and foremost a theologian, and although he was as successful as any in differentiating between philosophy proper and Sacred Doctrine, his main purpose in his constructive works was theological. H e states very clearly the relations between phi-losophy and theology: Philosophy can prove (by means of human reason unaided by any special illumination) some of the truths which are proposed by the Christian faith, it can elucidate truth which cannot be proved, and finally it can defend the principles of Christian faith against their de-tractors. But it is true at the same time that the subjects with which the philosophical theologian is principally concerned are already proposed by Sacred Doctrine. Moreover, although there can be no conflict between the truth obtainable by un-aided reason and that divinely revealed, philosophy falls 182 ST. Thomas Aquinas short of faith. 1 Therefore, although the existence of God as prime mover and as efficient and exemplary cause of the world can be established by reason alone, the full meaning of God can come only from faith.
eBook - PDFThe Vigilant God
Providence in the Thought of Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Barth, Second Edition
- Horton Davies(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
Thomas as the fore- most theological teacher of the Catholic Church. 2 Meanwhile, Neo-Thomism had developed, particularly in France under the aegis of Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson and M. D. Chenu, O. P. Maritain insisted that the study of Aquinas was no mere medieval and romantic anach- ronism, and his admiration reached this paean of praise: “We know that the wisdom of St. Thomas is running on the highways of the world before the footsteps of God … Our whole task is to prepare a way of approach to it. For this reason I have said and I repeat: Vae mihi, si non thomistizavero.” 3 (Woe is me if I do not thomisticize.) The importance of the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas and its domi- nant role in the Catholic Church is attested by the honorific titles which he received. He has been called the Angelic Doctor, an indication both of his holy life and towering intelligence, resembling that of the angels on whose hierarchy and quality he had written extensively. Also he has been named the Doctor of the Eucharist because it is believed that he was invited to compose for the feast of Corpus Domini (the Body of the Lord) the prayers and hymns of the Eucharist, and another Pope, six centuries later, gave him the title. 4 But his greatest name indicating his universal significance for the Latin Church is that of Common Doctor (Doctor Communis). 5 Yet in his own time he was fiercely criticized as well as applauded. This is the man whose reputation was castigated by the Bishop of Paris, because of Thomas’s Aristotelianism, so that he was officially condemned in 1377. This included many of the officially Thomist theses. Yet what other philosopher has ever been celebrated by the most famous poet of the Middle Ages? M. C. D’Arcy writes that after Thomas’s canonization his fame became universal: “the proof is that the greatest poet of the Middle Ages enshrined that philoso- phy in verse. Never has any other philosopher had such good fortune or been made so sure of immortality.
eBook - PDFCatholic Social Teaching
A Volume of Scholarly Essays
- Gerard V. Bradley, E. Christian Brugger(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
12 John Finnis accomplished before one’s own death. By embedding these truths in both the deep structure and the propositional texture of his works, Aquinas inoculated sound Christian thinking against political utopianism, including Liberation Theology and Teilhardist progressivism. 2 Aquinas’s work is characterized by its concern to transcend, so far as possible, the social and political conditions and questions of his own lifetime, and to participate in a vast transtemporal conversation ranging back about two millennia. That conversation extends from the pre-Socratic empiricist, mate- rialist, and morally skeptical proto-Machiavellian philosophers to the Greek cultural historians and Roman lawyers, on through the ferment of learned and inspired Christian appropriation and purification, to the dialectical grind of the scholastic and university project of reconciling all these sources of insight, knowledge, and wisdom. The centuries of Israel’s fortunes – advances and regressions, fidelities and backsliding – as recorded in the Old Testament presented Aquinas with a special source of empirical material about the vicissitudes of social life. And given his Christian freedom to respectfully reject most of their content as framed, he could find in Mosaic Law and institutions a laboratory for advanced social thinking – a laboratory in which he often worked. Any outline of Aquinas’s social thought 3 must start with his grasp of human dignity and equality and their objective basis in the reality of each individual’s rational nature. Having each of us this same nature, which at least by its radical capacities if not also by the flourishing of those capacities in actions and dispositions, we are each an image of the divine nature – above all of its capacity of freely choosing between intelligent alternatives.
eBook - PDF- Brian Davies, Paul Kucharski(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- T&T Clark(Publisher)
14 A Very Short Introduction to Aquinas I A friend of mine claims that once in a restaurant he overheard one waiter saying to another waiter: ‘He’s eaten it.’ When you catch a snippet of conver-sation like that you begin to be puzzled about its context. It’s going to be a little like that with what follows. We are going to overhear fragments of talk, and I am going to try to fit them into a context. Imagine you are passing the open window of a lecture room in the University of Paris one autumn in the thirteenth century. The room is crowded with young men who are going to be teachers or preachers (or both), and their lecturer, a Dominican Friar called Thomas Aquinas, is starting his course of lectures by telling them that if they are going to teach or preach they must first of all be taught themselves by God. God has destined us for a goal beyond the grasp of reason – No eye has seen what you have prepared for those who love you – and since we must set ourselves this goal and pursue it we needed teaching about it beforehand. We even need revealed instruction in things reason can learn about God. If such truths had been left to us to discover, they would have been learnt 240 THE McCABE READER by few over long periods and mingled with much error; yet our whole well-being is centered on God and depends on knowing them. So, in order that more of us might more safely attain him, we need teaching in which God revealed himself. 1 Aquinas treats theology as a practical matter. He is not interested in spinning theories about angels and the points of a pin. He is concerned with human well-being. Behind what he says is the image of people going somewhere: we have a ‘goal’, and (more mysteriously) a goal ‘beyond the grasp of reason’. Human well-being, he thinks, is a kind of journey, but a journey into the unknown, towards a destination we only dimly perceive by faith. I think here of the medieval folk-tale of the youngest son going out to seek his fortune.
- Roberto Di Ceglie(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Summa theologiae, II-II, q. , a. . See above, note . Thomas Aquinas Having concluded this debate, Thomas replaces the seeming definition at hand with one that he claims can properly be said to be a definition: “Habit of the mind, whereby eternal life is begun in us, making the intellect assent to what is non-apparent.” In this way, Thomas seems to insist on maintaining that faith is a virtue (not surprisingly, this occurs at the beginning of question , which Aquinas devotes to faith as a virtue). Faith is a good habit, which leads us to give our assent to the revealed truths and to somehow begin enjoying the eternal life. By faith, the believers desire to do good and become better, which is precisely what a virtue is able to produce. Aquinas’s definition focuses, therefore, on the role not only of the intellect but also of the will; not only on the initiative of the believer but also on the gratuitous intervention of God that allows the faithful to firmly trust in him. This does not coincide with the readings of Aquinas’s doctrine of faith that insist on its intellectual feature. According to Swinburne, for example, Aquinas looks at faith as mainly “belief-that,” while it is another view of faith, which Swinburne calls “Lutheran,” that “involves both theoretical beliefs-that (Thomist faith) and a trust in the Living God. The person of faith, on this view, does not merely believe that there is a God (and believe certain propositions about him), he trusts Him and commits himself to Him.” However, if my argument is correct, Aquinas’s view involves all of the elements in question. Crucial to Thomas’s reflection is his considering faith an intellectual act as well as a theological virtue. On the one hand, he assesses with philo- sophical rigor the relationship between faith and evidentness, and takes faith as a propositional attitude.
eBook - PDFRenaissance Philosophy: New Translations
Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457), Paul Cortese (1456–1510), Cajetan (1469–1534), Tiberio Baccilieri (ca. 1470–1511), Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), Peter Ramus (1515–1572)
- Leonard A. Kennedy(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
For my part, I praise again and again Saint Thomas' extraordinary subtlety of expression, I admire his care-fulness, I am amazed at the richness, variety, and perfection of his teachings. I say in addition, although many refuse to acknowledge it, what they say Thomas himself said, that he had read absolutely no book which he did not clearly understand; and this is something that, as far as I know, no one in our times has experienced, whether he be a jurist in civil law, or a physician in medicine, or a philosopher in phi-losophy, or a professor of rhetoric in the study of antiquities, and so in the rest of the arts and sciences, let alone one man in all of them. In Praise of Saint Thomas Aquinas 23 But as for these things which are called metaphysics and modes of sig-nification and other things of that sort, which the new theologians marvel at as if they were a new 8 sphere lately discovered, or the epicyc-les of the planets, I for my part do not find them so wonderful at all, and I do not think it matters so much whether one knows about them or not — things that perhaps are better not known because they are obstacles in the way of better kinds of knowledge. I shall prove this not by my own arguments, although I could do so, but on the author-ity of the old theologians, who, far from discussing this in their own books, have not left even the terms in their writings: Cyprian, Lactan-tius, Hilary, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine. Is this then through igno-rance? How could it be? If these terms have their root in our lan-guage, those men were masters of Latin, whereas the new men are all by comparison barbarians; or if in the Greek language, those men knew Greek, whereas these new men do not know it. Then why would they not have discussed these things? Because these things should not have been discussed, and perhaps they should not even have been known, and this for two reasons, one based on facts, the other on words.
eBook - PDFAugustine Deformed
Love, Sin and Freedom in the Western Moral Tradition
- John M. Rist(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Aquinas’ (unacknowledged) aim was coherently to appropriate Aristotle for the Augustinian tradition, clarifying and developing Augustine where it seemed appropriate, and modifying Aristotle – frequently, that is, Aristotle read in a tradition deriving via the Islamic commentators from the commentators of late antiquity – where Christian theology and philosophical truth apparently demanded such modification. Like most of his learned contemporaries, Aquinas should be viewed less as an Aristotelian than as a Christian thinker who found Aristotle’s ideas peculiarly useful for resolving apparent difficulties and incomplete- nesses in the inherited Augustinian tradition. Yet just as the philosophers of antiquity speak of virtue with no reference to anything like Christian theories of original sin and God’s grace – thus (for example) theoretic- ally allowing for political activity in any human society, not merely in our ‘Augustine’ and ‘Aristotle’ 105 present sin-distorted version – so in accounts of the ‘will’, and of justifica- tions of moral responsibility and its enforcement by God, we notice at key points in Aquinas and others comparative disregard of the ‘unfree’ yet guilty condition of the Augustinian sinner. We also notice – with the metaphysical backing of a thesis that the powers of the human soul must be separated from its essence (as at ST 1a, 77) – the growing possibil- ity of a ‘separate’ faculty of the autonomous will: separate, that is, from any mere possible interaction of intellect and desire, and – even more sig- nificantly – separate from love, Christian or other. As we have seen in Anselm, Bernard and their followers, such developments were well under way before Aquinas began to write.
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