THOMAS AQUINAS

(1224 to 1274)

Aristotelianism

The Human Intellect

God and Being

His Legacy

Aquinas's Writings

The most famous of the Dominican teachers was Thomas Aquinas, who taught in Paris and in Italy. He was deeply influenced by Aristotle's empiricism (taught by Albertus Magnus). He attempted to couple it with the Platonic foundations of Christian philosophy of his times. But being instinctively Aristotelian rather than Platonic (or Augustinian), Aquinas felt that knowledge came prinicipally through the rational ordering of what our senses reveal to us about the natural order. The world around us was the reality that we truly had to deal with in the here and now. And this world was not in itself evil--or something to be dismissed, as did the Platonist-Augustinian mindset still strong in his times. True, following up on Albertus' views, he constantly affirmed the primacy of "higher" revelation knowledge which alone gives us understanding of the divine mysteries of faith. But for Aquinas, such revelation knowledge meant only the logical revelation of Scripture--as interpreted traditionally by the Church Fathers. Aquinas opposed Platonic-Augustinian mysticism with its emphasis upon truth derived from Spirit-inspired insight. To Aquinas, mystically derived wisdom, seemed too dubious a source of knowledge. Mysticism was, to his way of thinking, terribly liable to abuse by milk-maids and overly imaginative cowherds. Thus Aquinas downplayed the role in knowledge of the Holy Spirit and replaced it with the power of the Church and its wide range of sacraments in dispensing God's grace. Further he explained works (of love) as the means by which faith is formed and the individual is justified before God and thus saved--although these works are possible only through the enabling power of God's Church-dispensed grace (through the sacraments). [However, ironically enough, he himself had a powerful mystical experience of his own shortly before his death. At this point he himself commented on his life-long work of scholastic thought as being mere "straw"--an matter usually dismissed by those who hold his scholasticism in worshipful regard!]

To Aquinas the physical and spiritual, body and soul, are not independent phenomenon but of one substance (in distinction to the dualism of the Platonist-Augustinians) --though the soul alone survives death, where it rests while it waits to be reunited with the body at the Last Day. Aquinas took the view that the human mind was essentially a blank slate at birth. Gradually in its own development, the senses begin to organize physical perceptions in the mind, slowly bringing us to the awareness of reality (physical reality) as fact or data.  At the same time, the active intellect (nous) focuses on this data and organizes it into useful information--or ideas or truths. The source of this organizational power of the mind comes as a gift of God, who has placed an element of His own divine light within us--so that we might recognize forms or ideas.

God's essence is in the way all existence is sumed up in Him--not just in certain Ideas or Forms (as an architect's blueprint does not sum up the architect himself). Further, God is existence--not just a part of it. God is the very force giving rise to all life or existence within creation (working according to specific Ideas or Forms to be sure--but transcending the function of being merely a prototype of all things). God draws all things from potentiality to actuality. It is God Himself who draws us ever-forward in our thoughts, helping us to realize our humanity, in order to approach fulfillment of His Divine Plan. Indeed, its is God's design that man's purpose in life is to come to know fully all things--as the sum of all things gives testimony to the essence of God. But--God does not imart knowledge by impressing every human thought with His thought (Platonism), but by fully endowed man at birth with his own potential, through his own human reason, to come to the knowledge of all things. By expanding his own mind, man is making an intellectual journey toward God, is being conformed to God, is participating in God--a matter of great pleasure for God. And by "expanding his own mind," Aquinas meant rational enquiry, empirical investigation of reality, the pursuit of science. Thus to Aquinas the pursuit of empirical knowledge was the way of mystical union with God.

There are some perplexing features of Aquinas' legacy to Western thought.  His work became the theological underpinning of the Roman Catholic church in its struggles against Protestant theology.  And basically it remains in that same privileged position within the Catholic Church down to today. Yet Aquinas himself late in his life underwent some kind of "second thoughts" on his works--for reasons he never fully explained.  He was recorded as saying on the morning of December 6, 1273, as he was saying mass in Naples: "I can do no more.  Such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as straw--and now I await the end of my life."  He died three months later.

Aquinas' major works or writings: Manual against the Heathens On Being and Essence On Truth Summa Theologica Compendium of Theology Of God and His Creatures (Summa Contra Gentiles) On the Principles of Nature

Go to the history section: The High Middle Ages (mid-1100s to Late 1300s)

  Miles H. Hodges