Who is St.
Thomas Aquinas?
He is an Italian philosopher,
theologian, and Dominican friar whose works have made him the most important
figure in Scholastic philosophy and one of the leading Roman Catholic
theologians.
The Life of
St. Thomas Aquinas
•
Thomas Aquinas was born on 1225
in the castle of Roccasecca.
•
He was the scion of Count
Landulph of Aquino and Countess Theodora of Theate.
•
He was educated at Monte
Cassino and then the University of Naples.
•
He became a Dominican over the
protests of his family.
•
He eventually went north to
study at Paris.
•
Then he went to Cologne and
studied with St. Albert the Great, whose interest in Aristotle strengthened his
own predilections.
•
He completed his studies in
Paris, became a Master and for three years occupied one of the Dominican chairs
in the Faculty of Theology.
•
The next ten years were spent
in various places in Italy, with the mobile papal court, at various Dominican
houses, and eventually in Rome.
•
From Rome he was called back to
Paris to confront the controversy variously called Latin Averroism and
Heterodox Aristotelianism. After this second three year stint, he was assigned
to Naples.
•
In 1274, on his way to the
Council of Lyon, he fell ill and died on March 7 in the Cistercian abbey at
Fossanova, which is perhaps twenty kilometers from Roccasecca.
His Battle
Against Averroism
Averroism is a Medieval school of philosophy that begun in the late 13th Century, based on the
works of the 12th Century Arab philosopher Averroës (Ibn Rushd) and his
interpretations of Aristotle and his reconciliation of Aristotelianism with the
Islamic faith.
The movement, which can be
considered a type of Scholasticism, is sometimes also known as Radical
Aristotelianism or Heterodox Aristotelianism. The term "Averroism"
itself was coined as late as the 19th Century.
The main ideas of the
philosophical concept of Averroism include:
•
there is one truth, but there
are (at least) two ways to reach it, through philosophy and through religion;
•
the world is eternal;
•
the soul is divided into two
parts, one individual, and one divine;
•
the individual soul is not
eternal;
•
all humans at the basic level
share one and the same divine soul (an idea known as monopsychism);
•
resurrection of the dead is not
possible (this was put forth by Boetius)
St. Thomas’s
Education
Monte Cassino
- Is a
Monastic School that is one of the principal conduits of the liberal arts
-
Focuses on the arts of the
trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic) and arts of the quadrivium (arithmetic,
geometry, music and astronomy)
-
These constituted the secular
education complemented with sacred doctrine as learned from the Bible.
University of Naples
-
His education in the arts
continued.
-
Here it would have been impressed
upon him that the liberal arts were no longer adequate categories of secular
learning: the new translations of Aristotle spelled the end of the liberal arts
tradition, although the universities effected a transition rather than a
breach.
University of Paris
•
His college education began
here as the superiors of the Dominican Order sent him here. Paris was then the
intellectual center of Christendom.
Studium generale of Dominicans in Cologne
•
There he studied from 1248 to
1252 with St. Albert the Great, who was named Doctor Universalis in the Middle
Ages because of his wide ranging scholarly interests.
University of Paris
•
Aquinas returned to the
University of Paris (1252-1256) to complete his theological training.
•
The secular masters of the
university refused to admit Aquinas, as well as his Franciscan colleague
Bonaventure, as a master. Only through papal intervention was their resistance
brought to an end.
The Medieval University: An Analysis
•
Faculty of Arts provided the
point of entry to teen-aged boys. The faculty is modeled on the guilds where
the student served a long apprenticeship, established his competence in stages,
and eventually after a public examination was named a master and then gave his
inaugural lecture.
•
With the attainment of the Master
of Arts at about the age of 20, one could go on to study in a higher faculty,
law, medicine or theology.
St. Thomas’s
Writings
•
Commentary on the Sentences
•
On Being and Essence
•
The Principles of Nature
•
On the Trinity
•
De hebdomadibus
•
Summa contra gentiles
•
De Anima
•
Summa theologiae
Theologian
or Philosopher?
Many contemporary philosophers are
unsure how to read St. Thomas. He was in his primary and official profession a
theologian. Nonetheless, we find among his writings works anyone would recognize
as philosophical and the dozen commentaries on Aristotle increasingly enjoy the
respect and interest of Aristotelian scholars. Even within theological works as
such there are extended discussions that are easily read as possessing a
philosophical character.
“… the believer and the philosopher
consider creatures differently. The philosopher considers what belongs to their
proper natures, while the believer considers only what is true of creatures
insofar as they are related to God, for example, that they are created by God
and are subject to him, and the like.” (Summa contra gentiles, bk II,
chap. 4)
“… it should be noted that
different ways of knowing (ratio cognoscibilis) give us different
sciences. The astronomer and the natural philosopher both conclude that the
earth is round, but the astronomer does this through a mathematical middle that
is abstracted from matter, whereas the natural philosopher considers a middle
lodged in matter. Thus there is nothing to prevent another science from
treating in the light of divine revelation what the philosophical disciplines
treat as knowable in the light of human reason.” (Summa theologiae,
Ia.1.1 ad 2)
The presuppositions of the
philosopher, that to which his discussions and arguments are ultimately driven
back, are in the public domain, as it were. They are things that everyone in
principle can know upon reflection; they are where disagreement between us must
come to an end. These principles are not themselves the products of deductive
proof—which does not of course mean that they are immune to rational analysis
and inquiry—and thus they are said to be known by themselves (per se, as
opposed to per alia).
Theological discourse and inquiry
look like any other and is, needless to say, governed by the common principles
of thought and being; but it is characterized formally by the fact that its
arguments and analyses are taken to be truth-bearing only for one who accepts
Scriptural revelation as true.
The Theology
of St. Thomas
Faith and reason are the two primary tools which are both necessary in obtaining a
true knowledge of God.
He believed that God reveals himself through
nature, so that rational thinking and the study of nature is also the
study of God (a blend of Aristotelian Greek philosophy with Christian
doctrine).
From his consideration of what God
is not, Aquinas proposed five positive statements about the divine qualities or
the nature of God:
•
God is simple, without composition of parts, such as body and soul, or matter and
form.
•
God is perfect, lacking nothing.
•
God is infinite, and not limited in the ways that created beings are physically,
intellectually, and emotionally limited.
•
God is immutable, incapable of change in respect of essence and character.
•
God is one, such that God's essence is the same as God's existence.
Aquinas believed that the
existence of God is neither self-evident nor beyond proof. In the Summa
Theologica, he details five rational proofs for the existence of God, the quinquae
viae or the Five Ways:
•
Argument of the unmoved
mover (ex motu) -everything that is moved is
moved by a mover, therefore there is an unmoved mover from whom all motion
proceeds, which is God.
•
Argument of the first cause (ex causa) - everything that is caused is caused by
something else, therefore there must be an uncaused cause of all caused things,
which is God.
•
Argument from contingency (ex contingentia) - there are contingent beings in the
universe which may either exist or not exist and, as it is impossible for
everything in the universe to be contingent (as something cannot come of
nothing), so there must be a necessary being whose existence is not contingent
on any other being, which is God.
•
Argument from degree (ex
gradu) - there are various degrees of perfection which may be found throughout
the universe, so there must be a pinnacle of perfection from which lesser
degrees of perfection derive, which is God.
•
Teleological argument (ex fine) - all natural bodies in the world (which are in
themselves unintelligent) act towards ends (which is characteristic of
intelligence), therefore there must be an intelligent being that guides all
natural bodies towards their ends, which is God.
St. Thomas believed that Jesus Christ was truly divine and
not simply a human being or God merely inhabiting the body of Christ. However,
he held that Christ had a truly rational human soul as well, producing a
duality of natures that persisted even after the Incarnation, and that these
two natures existed simultaneously yet distinguishably in one real human body.
St. Thomas’
Philosophy
Philosophical thinking is
characterized by its argumentative structure and a science is taken to be
principally the discovery of the properties of kinds of things.
Like Aristotle, St. Thomas holds
that there is a plurality of both theoretical and practical sciences.
•
The practical use of the
mind has as its object the guidance of some activity other than thinking.
e.g. Ethics, economics and politics
•
The theoretical use of the
mind has truth as its object. It seeks not to change the world but to
understand it.
e.g. physics, mathematics and metaphysics
Another way to philosophical
inquiry has something to do with the appropriate order in which it should be
studied. That order of learning is as follows:
- Logic. The primacy of logic in this
order stems from the fact that we have to know what knowledge is so we
will recognize that we have met its demands in a particular case.
- Mathematics. The study of
mathematics comes early because little experience of the world is required
to master it.
- Natural philosophy. Knowledge of
the physical world requires an ever increasing dependence upon a wide and
deep experience of things.
- Moral philosophy. This requires not
only experience, but good upbringing and the ordering of the passions.
- Metaphysics. Speculative wisdom is
the culminating and defining goal of philosophical inquiry: it is such
knowledge as we can achieve of the divine, the first cause of all else.
St. Thomas
and Education
For Aquinas, teaching is
connected with the Divine, since he argues that though human beings are
able to teach, they do so in a secondary sense and that it is God who primarily
teaches. This is because God is the source of all being and is the light at the
heart of our being.
In the learning process, a key
feature of Aquinas’s account builds on the nature of illumination,
which is to say an understanding of what is taught that enables us to see how
what we have learnt connects to other things.
Ultimately, these connections lead us to Wisdom,
which is to say God, and for Aquinas wisdom in its different forms is the
central aim of all teaching and learning.
Although Aquinas does not develop
a treatise on teaching and learning, he spent a considerable amount of his time
teaching and throughout his writings there are references to teaching and to
learning.
He deals explicitly with teaching and learning in a
number of his works:
•
De Veritate , question 11;
•
Summa Theologica , prima
pars , question 117
•
II Sentences, questions 9 and 28
“Education has, and hence teaching
and learning have, an unambiguous theological goal, namely, God, who is wisdom
and truth.”
“The ultimate end of the whole
universe is Truth and this is also the aim of the wise.”
Recognition of the teacher as a
role model for the pupil
Love and enthusiasm for the
subject, while crucial to teaching, are not enough; the teacher must also
genuinely care for the truth and be committed to possessing a mastery of his or
her subject.
Faith is required not just for religious
belief, but for scientific understanding as well, for as Aquinas says, we
could not live in the world at all unless we are prepared to have faith.
–
The emphasis on trust and faith
in teaching and learning in particular highlights the importance of the
relationship between the teacher and the learner.
Teacher and learner are both
engaged in a voyage of discovery for the truth.
–
A poor or distant relationship
will not facilitate learning, since it will not promote the trust required for
the pupil to have confidence in the teacher.
Passages
from Aquinas:
“Man can truly be called
a true teacher in as much as he teaches the truth and enlightens the mind. This
does not mean, however, that he endows the mind with light, but that, as it
were, he co-operates with the light of reason by supplying external help to it
to reach the perfection of knowledge.”
–
–
Quaestiones De Veritate, 11
“Man, teaching from
without, does not infuse the intelligible light, but he is in a certain sense a
cause of the intelligible species, in so far as he offers us certain signs of
intelligible likenesses, which our understanding receives from those signs and
keeps within itself. ”
–
–
Quaestiones De Veritate, 11
“Knowledge, therefore,
pre-exists in the learner potentially, not, however, in the purely passive, but
in the active, sense. Otherwise, man would not be able to acquire knowledge
independently. Therefore, as there are two ways of being cured, that is, either
through the activity of unaided nature or by nature with the aid of medicine,
so also there are two ways of acquiring knowledge. In one way, natural reason
by itself reaches knowledge of unknown things, and this way is called discovery;
in the other way, when someone else aids the learner’s natural reason, and
this is called learning by instruction.”
–
–
Quaestiones De Veritate, 11
