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Italian Christian theologian and philosopher
Saint Thomas Aquinas, San Tommaso d'Aquino, also called Aquino, was an Italian Dominican theologian, entitled Doctor of the Catholic Church, disciple of the great scholastic Alberto Magno and main thinker of medieval Scholasticism. Inspired by the ideas of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas was based on Aristotelian realism.
Aristotle in Medieval Philosophy
Catholicism was growing and there was a need to form new priests, in addition to taking the foundations of Western civilization to all the peoples where catholicism had arrived. For this, the Church encouraged the construction of the first hospitals, nursing homes, universities and schools. These institutions contained libraries that preserved Greek and Roman works against vandalism by barbarian and Islamic peoples after the fall of the Roman Empire. St. Thomas rescued and introduced Aristotle into medieval philosophy. Previous medieval currents were based on Saint Augustine and Plato.
Scientific rationalism
Rationalism claims that everything that exists has an intelligible cause, even if that cause cannot be empirically demonstrated, such as the cause of the origin of the universe. It privileges reason to the detriment of the experience of the sensitive world as a way of accessing knowledge. He also regards deduction as the superior method of philosophical inquiry.
For the first time in history, Christian believers and theologians were confronted with the rigorous demands of scientific rationalism. New generations of people, including clergymen, reacted against the traditional notion of contempt for the world and struggled to master the forces of nature using reason. The framework of Aristotle's philosophy emphasized the primacy of intelligence. Technology has become a means of accessing the truth; mechanical arts were powers to humanize the cosmos.
Thus, the question about the relationship between general words like “red” and particulars like “this red object” – which had dominated scholastic philosophy from the beginning – was left behind, and a coherent metaphysics of knowledge and of the world was being developed.
Aristotelian-Thomist philosophy or Thomism
The thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas originated in the context of the Quaestio disputata. Debate and argumentation in search of truth have always been encouraged by the Church, but at the time of Scholasticism it focused on understanding the value of faith and reason.
The great achievement of Thomas Aquinas and the basis of his thought is the union between faith and reason. As a scholar of classical philosophy, he was able to perceive the relationship between Aristotelian logic and Christian faith. Thus, he created a bridge between philosophy and theology.
The philosophy so far explored was that of Plato. On the one hand there were the dialecticians who defended the use of reason to explain everything, on the other there were the deists who wanted to consider only the Holy Scriptures as the only possible source of truth.
Saint Thomas knew that everything in Holy Scripture was true, but he also understood that God was merciful. Thus, people who did not know the Word could arrive at the basic concepts of faith through the correct use of reason. Even living years before Christ and in a polytheistic society, Aristotle developed a logical thought that pointed to the existence of a single supreme being, complete and prior to all. Therefore, faith and reason were reconcilable.
From then on, the period of Scholasticism was marked by Aristotelian-Thomist Philosophy, or simply Thomism, due to the combination of elements from Aristotelian Philosophy and Christian Theology. It is from the Aristotelian concept of the First Immovable Mover that St. Thomas develops his thought of proving the existence of God.
Difference between essence, substance and existence
The Greeks observed that there is an ideal of things formed by their essence. That's what makes them what they are. In order to exist, they believed that this essence should materialize, that is, assume a form that can be seen and touched, called substance.
However, Saint Thomas adds the notion that substance does not define existence, it is only a possible consequence. He argues and develops the thought that the essence exists in itself, even without becoming physical. Otherwise our thoughts should be physical.
Thus, the concept of ontology is rescued, the philosophical part that studies the existence of being in any condition. For Aquinas, God is an example of an essence that does not depend on substance to exist.
In man there is not only a distinction between spirit and nature, but also an intrinsic homogeneity of the two. Aquinas found in Aristotle the necessary categories for the expression of this concept: the soul is the “form” of the body. For Aristotle, form is what makes a thing what it is; form and matter – what a thing is made of – are the two intrinsic causes that constitute every material thing. For Thomas, the body is matter and the soul is the form of man.
Physis and logos, two realities of nature
The logic of Aquinas's position on faith and reason demanded that one recognize the fundamental consistency of the realities of nature. A physis (nature) has necessary laws; the recognition of this fact allows the construction of a science according to a logos (rational structure). Thomas thus avoided the temptation to sacralize the forces of nature through a naive recourse to the miraculous or to the Providence of God.
For him, a whole “supernatural” world that cast its shadow over things and men, in Romanesque art as well as in social customs, confused men's imagination. Nature, discovered in its profane reality, must assume its own religious value and lead to God along more rational paths, but not simply as a shadow of the supernatural.
There was a fear by many that the true values of nature were not properly distinguished from the disordered inclinations of the mind and heart. Mainstream theologians steadfastly resisted any form of deterministic philosophy which, they believed, would atrophy freedom, dissolve personal responsibility, destroy faith in Providence, and negate the notion of a gratuitous act of creation. Imbued with the doctrines of St. Augustine, they asserted the necessity and power of grace for a sin-torn nature. The new theology's optimism about the religious value of nature scandalized them.
Although he was an Aristotelian, Aquinas was sure he could hold his own against a heterodox interpretation of the “philosopher,” as Aristotle was known. Thomas maintained that human freedom could be defended as a rational thesis, assuming that determinations are found in nature.
In his theology of Providence, he taught a continuous creation, in which the creator's dependence on creative wisdom guarantees the reality of nature's order. God sovereignly moves all that he creates; but the supreme government which he exercises over the universe conforms to the laws of a creative Providence, which wants each being to act in accordance with his own nature.
How to reconcile faith and reason
Averroës, the outstanding representative of Arab philosophy in Spain, known as the great commentator and interpreter of Aristotle, had his works known by the Parisian masters. There seems to be no doubt about the Cordoban philosopher's Islamic faith; however, he claimed that the structure of religious knowledge was entirely heterogeneous to rational knowledge. The existence of two truths—one of faith, the other of reason—may ultimately be contradictory.
This dualism was denied by Muslim orthodoxy and even less acceptable to Christians. However, for Siger of Brabant, professor of philosophy at the University of Paris and a leading representative of the radical, or heterodox, school, the quality of Averroes' exegesis and the wholly rational bent of his thought began to attract disciples in the University's faculty of arts. from Paris.
According to Saint Thomas, Siger was compromising not only orthodoxy but also the Christian interpretation of Aristotle. Aquinas found himself trapped in the tradition of Augustinian thought, now more emphatic than ever in its criticism of Aristotle and the Averroists. Radical Averroism was condemned in 1270 and Thomas, who sanctioned the autonomy of reason under faith, was discredited.
In the course of this dispute the very method of theology was called into question. According to Thomas Aquinas, reason is able to operate within faith and yet according to its own laws. The mystery of God is expressed and incarnated in human language; it can thus become the object of an active, conscious and organized elaboration, in which the rules and structures of rational activity are integrated in the light of faith.
In the Aristotelian sense of the word, though not in the modern sense, theology is a "science"; it is knowledge that is rationally derived from propositions that are accepted as correct because they are revealed by God. The theologian accepts authority and faith as his starting point and then proceeds to conclusions using reason; the philosopher, on the other hand, relies only on the natural light of reason.
Reason, for Saint Thomas, is a human capacity created by God. Therefore, when reason is well used, it can bring a person closer to the basis of faith. However, when philosophy tries to explain all points of faith or thinks that it alone can explain the whole world, it turns out to be incomplete and results in errors.
Five ways to prove the existence of God
The five ways are reasonings that prove the existence of God using reason alone. This thought is a causal regression, that is, it starts from a point and evaluates what came before it to cause it.
Based on Aristotle, we realize that the world is always in motion and that the purpose of this movement is to improve things. There is nothing in our reality that is absolutely immobile, even the reliefs change over the years. Therefore, only what is perfect can be immovable. From this we can say that things exist in two forms at once:
Act - is that which is in the present, as it exists now.
Power - that's what it will become in the future.
Example:
The seed of a tree is a seed in act and a tree in potentiality. As much as at present we only see the seed, inside there is every component of a tree. If there are no harmful artificial things, naturally the seed will become a tree because that is its function.
Therefore, movement exists to transform potency into act. Then the seed becomes the tree, and the tree becomes the act. With these concepts in mind, Saint Thomas elaborates the five ways:
1- The motionless engine - in the universe, all movement only exists because there is a cause: if the leaf falls, it is because of the wind. If it's windy, it's because the air has moved. If the air has moved, it is because there has been a pressure difference. If there was a pressure difference, it is because the air atoms rearranged themselves, and so on.
By logic, we arrive at the idea that there was a first thing that caused the universe to move in the first place. This first mover can only be immovable, because if it were moved by someone, it would cease to be the first.
2- The first efficient cause - if the first cause is immovable and the movement only exists to perfect, then the first cause is perfect. In common language, we say that something is efficient when it fulfills its function, therefore, to be perfect is to be efficient. If it fulfilled all the functions, all the potencies have already been achieved, then it is also a pure act.
Here it is evident that St. Thomas sees God as the first immovable and efficient mover. This logical reasoning shows that the first being is omnipotent (it can do anything and only depends on itself) and omnipresent (it is present in everything and precedes everything), as Christian theology asserts.
3- Necessary being and possible being - if we continue the reasoning, we see that the first being is necessary for all the others to exist, as it is an act with the various potencies. Therefore, there is the Necessary Being (it simply is and does not cease to be) and the possible beings (may or may not exist, depending on the Necessary Being).
4- Degrees of perfection - in this part, we see an argument inspired by Plato and mixed with Aristotle. São Tomás ends up developing a hierarchy of things, depending on how much act and potency there is in them. The closer to God, the more act will be because less has to perfect. Thus, the hierarchy of creatures arises: God, angels, humans, animals, etc.
5- Supreme government - all this reasoning makes it clear that there is an order in the world, and rationality itself is a way of recognizing the order that already exists. This is very noticeable when we see the behavior of animals, the seasons, the causes of things. Each has a degree of order.
If we can create a machine that runs smoothly, it's because we have intelligence. And if we have intelligence, it's because there was a supreme Intelligence that ordained us that way.
Ethics, single truth and rights
In the field of ethics, São Tomás de Aquino argued that reason itself leads us to act virtuously, as we observe that change only exists with the aim of improving. Thus, there is a Natural Law within our being that leads us to act like this, if we listen to it.
Saint Thomas Aquinas, using the five ways to prove the existence of God, arrives rationally at the idea of the only and absolute Truth. The first unmoved mover is that which is pure act, therefore it contains and is the Truth. Therefore, it cannot be relative.
For Aquinas and Aristotle, man is a social and political animal. Hence arises the first natural form of human relationship, the family. In a second moment, families came together in order to help each other and form societies. On a third level, society was organized into a State to facilitate mediation between them.
Therefore, the State formed naturally, but it must exist subordinate to the family. He must serve and not be served, be controlled and not control, in addition to having the function of protecting natural laws. Thus, if most families have a well-established religion, morals and ethics, it is fair that the State reflects this.
Summa theologica and Summa against the gentiles
As a theologian, in his two masterpieces, the Summa Theologica and the Summa against the gentiles, Thomas was responsible for the classical systematization of Latin theology. As a poet, he wrote some of the most beautiful Eucharistic hymns in the Catholic Church's liturgy. Although many modern Roman Catholic theologians do not find St. Thomas entirely likeable, the Catholic Church recognizes him as its leading Western philosopher and theologian.
The Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas' undisputed masterpiece, was written as a textbook for theology students, whose faith was already presumed. In it, Thomas Aquinas makes a clear exposition of the principles of Catholicism, which were accepted by the Church and remain valid. It was written with the aim of proving that human reason is not opposed to faith.
The Summa against the gentiles was written as a systematic exposition and defense of Christian belief for the persuasion of unbelievers, and it ranks among the finest texts in the history of apologetics.
Context of Thomas Aquinas' methodology
The literary form of Thomas Aquinas' works must be appreciated in the context of his methodology. He organized his teaching in the form of “questions”, in which critical research is presented by arguments for and against, according to the pedagogical system then in use in universities. Forms ranged from simple commentaries on official texts to written accounts of public disputes, which were significant events in medieval university life.
Oppositions to Thomas Aquinas
In 1277, the masters of Paris, the Church's highest theological jurisdiction, condemned a series of 219 propositions; 12 of these propositions were theses of Thomas Aquinas. It was the most serious condemnation possible in the Middle Ages; its repercussions were felt in the development of ideas. It produced for several centuries a certain unhealthy spiritualism that resisted the cosmic and anthropological realism of Thomas Aquinas.
Legacy of Saint Thomas Aquinas
The biography of Thomas Aquinas is extremely simple; he recounts little, but a few modest trips during a career entirely devoted to university life: in Paris, in the Roman Curia, again in Paris and in Naples. It would be a mistake, however, to judge that his life was just the quiet life of a professional teacher untouched by the social and political affairs of his time.
The drama that was going on in his mind and in his religious life found its causes and produced its effects at the university. In the young universities all the ingredients of a rapidly developing civilization were gathered, and to these universities the Christian church had deliberately and authoritatively committed its doctrine and its spirit. In this environment, Tomás found the technical conditions to craft his work - not only the controversial occasions to release it, but also the immersive and penetrating spiritual environment necessary for it.
It is within the homogeneous contexts provided by this environment that it is possible today to discover the historical intelligibility of his work, just as they provided the climate for his fecundity at the time of his birth.
Thomas Aquinas was canonized as a saint in 1323, officially appointed a Doctor of the Church in 1567, and proclaimed a protagonist of Orthodoxy during the modernist crisis of the late 19th century. This continued praise, however, cannot exclude the historical difficulties he became involved in in the thirteenth century during a radical theological renewal - a renewal which was contested at the time and yet was brought about by the social, cultural and religious evolution of the West. . Thomas was at the center of the doctrinal crisis that faced Christendom with the discovery of Greek science and culture, and the thought seemed ready to overwhelm him.
Biography
Saint Thomas Aquinas, was born in 1224/25, in Roccasecca, near Aquino, Terra di Lavoro, Kingdom of Sicily. His parents owned a modest feudal domain on a border constantly disputed by the emperor and the pope. His father was of Lombard origin; his mother was of later invading Norman heritage. His people were distinguished in the service of Emperor Frederick II during the civil war in southern Italy between papal and imperial forces.
Thomas was placed in the monastery of Monte Cassino near his home as an oblate (offered as a prospective monk) while still a boy. In 1239, after nine years in this sanctuary of spiritual and cultural life, young Thomas was forced to return to his family when the emperor expelled the monks because they were too obedient to the pope.
He was sent to the University of Naples, where he first encountered the scientific and philosophical works being translated from Greek and Arabic. In this scenario, Tomás decided to join the Friars Preachers, or Dominicans, a new religious order founded 30 years ago, which departed from the traditional paternalistic form of government of the monks to the more democratic form of the mendicant friars and the monastic life of prayer and work. manual for a more active life of preaching and teaching.
However, it was in the city of Cologne, Germany, that Aquinas wrote his first works, being a disciple of the German bishop, philosopher and theologian Santo Alberto Magno, known as Alberto, the great.
The encounter between the gospel and the culture of his time formed the nerve center of Tomás' position and directed his development. Typically, his work is presented as the integration of Christian thought into newly discovered Aristotelian philosophy, in competition with the integration of Platonic thought effected by the Church Fathers during the first 12 centuries of the Christian era.
Thomas Aquinas must be understood in his context as a religious mendicant, influenced both by the evangelism of Saint Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan order, and by the devotion to erudition of Saint Dominic, founder of the Dominican order.
When Thomas Aquinas arrived at the University of Paris, the influx of Arab-Aristotelian science was awakening a strong reaction among believers, and ecclesiastical authorities tried several times to block the naturalism and rationalism that emanated from this philosophy and, according to many ecclesiastics, seducing the younger generations.
After earning a bachelor's degree, he received the licentia docendi (license to teach) in early 1256 and shortly thereafter completed the training necessary for the title and privileges of expert. So, in the year 1256 he began to teach theology in one of the two Dominican schools incorporated in the University of Paris.
Around Easter time, 1272, Thomas returned to Italy to establish a Dominican house of study at the University of Naples. This move was no doubt made in response to a request from King Charles of Anjou, who was keen to revive the university.
In January 1274, Thomas Aquinas was personally summoned by Pope Gregory X to the Second Council of Lyons, which was an attempt to repair the schism between the Latin and Greek Churches. On the way, he was stricken with an illness and stopped at the Cistercian Abbey of Fossanova, where he died on 7 March.
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