1) His Biography:
Thomas Aquinas, maybe the most well-known and esteemed theologian and philosopher of the Catholic Church, was born in 1225 as the youngest son of a Sicilian noble family. Aquinas was originally intended to become an abbot, but Italian political and papal squabbling diverted him to a university in Naples. There, members of the newly founded Dominican Order directed his studies and introduced him to Aristotle for the first time.
Despite persistent and strong opposition from his family, Aquinas eventually joined the order. Before joining the faculty of the University of Paris as regent master in theology, Aquinas travelled to France in 1245 to pursue his studies under the famed Aristotelian commentator and fellow Dominican, Albert Magnus. It was around this time that he started writing his Summa contra Gentiles. Aquinas left Paris after serving as regent and went back to Italy in 1259. Pope Clement IV then invited him to Rome in 1265 to work as a papal theologian.
Aquinas started writing the Summa Theologiae, also known as the Summa Theologica, while still in Rome, where he was teaching at the recently opened Santa Sabina Dominican school Aquinas was once more requested to act as regent master in Paris in 1268, where “Averroism,” or unorthodox Aristotelianism, had become well-known inside the institution. After his second regency in Paris was over, Aquinas returned to Naples, where he established a new Dominican university, took on the role of regent master once more, and continued to work on his Summa Theologiae. The Second Council of Lyons was summoned in 1274 by Pope Gregory X in an effort to heal the deep rift that had broken out inside the Church in 1054. Aquinas was summoned to the council, but while en route he was in an accident, was unwell, and passed away on March 7th, 1274. Aquinas achieved sainthood fifty years after his passing and was later designated a Doctor of the Church in 1567.
2) Main Work:
Although he produced numerous philosophical and theological writings over the course of his life, the Summa Theologica, which is divided into three sections, is his most important work. The first section focuses on God. In it, he explains God’s characteristics and offers five arguments for His existence. He makes an argument for God’s actuality and incorporeality as the unmoved mover and explains how God moves through thinking and willing. The ethics section is the second.
According to Thomas, the Aristotelian Virtue Ethics should be modified. But unlike Aristotle, he makes the case for a link between the good man and God by describing how doing good works leads to the blessings of the Beatific Vision. The Summa’s final section, which focuses on Christ, was unfinished when Thomas passed away. He demonstrates in it how Christ not only provides salvation but also stands in for and defends the human race both on Earth and in Heaven. The sacraments and eschatological are briefly covered in this section as well. This summary of Thomas’s philosophy will mostly focus on The Summa, which is still the most well-known of his writings. Aquinas was a prolific author who produced roughly 60 known writings of various lengths. His writings were copied by hand and given to libraries all around Europe. His writings on philosophy and theology covered a wide range of subjects, including comments on the Bible and analyses of Aristotle’s works on natural philosophy.
3) Main Themes in his Writings:
Theology as Superior to Philosophy:
Aquinas is a theologian who uses philosophy to try to offer, as much as is conceivable, a logical justification for beliefs that are matters of faith or revealed knowledge. The Summa Theologica serves primarily as a work of theology, despite the fact that it is a work of philosophy in some ways. For Aquinas and his fellow Scholastics, who believed that theology and philosophy follow different paths, this distinction was crucial.
Theology is concerned with knowledge that man must accept on faith as having been revealed by God. At least according to Aristotle, philosophy is the study of knowledge that a person gains via sensory experience and the application of reason. In other words, philosophy makes an effort to arrive at general principles by taking into account what is noticed by the senses and then assessed logically. Theology contains topics that reason cannot explain, such as the mystery of the Holy Trinity, even if some topics, like the awareness that God exists, are shared by both theology and philosophy.
Aquinas thinks that individuals naturally want knowledge of that which is their real purpose and happiness, i.e., the vision of God, in accordance with Aristotle’s well-known statement that “all men by nature desire to know.” Philosophy and reason both play important roles in the pursuit of knowledge, yet they are fundamentally incapable of comprehending all facts.
Philosophers are all theologians, but not all philosophers are theologians; rather, philosophical knowledge is a subset of theological knowledge. Theological knowledge is not in any way inferior to philosophical knowledge despite the fact that it is founded on revealed truth and faith rather than on sensory experience and using reason. Theological knowledge, on the other hand, is superior to philosophical knowledge in that it not only addresses matters of the utmost significance, but also in that it is the only source that can truly provide us with a full understanding of such matters.
The Importance of Aristotle’s Four Causes:
Aristotle’s idea of the Four Causes is adopted by Aquinas, who utilises it to frame much of his theology and philosophy. The four causes are: (1) the material cause, (2) the formal cause, (3) the efficient cause, and (4) the final cause.
The material cause is related to matter, or the “stuff,” of the universe, as its name suggests. Matter is potentiality, or what something could potentially become. The form or pattern that regulates a specific entity, or the genus to which it belongs, is known as the formal cause. The formal cause of something is often referred to as its essence. For instance, a specific human being’s humanity, the core of what it means to be human, is the formal cause of that person.
God is the only being capable of encapsulating both pure actuality and pure existence, making him the sole pure formal cause. The term “efficient cause” refers to something that has an effect and is what we typically mean by the word “cause.” The ultimate cause is the aim or function that something is directed toward.
In Aquinas’s philosophy, each of these causes is given a unique application. His theory of how people learn about the outside world and his arguments for the existence of God both depend on the idea of material causation. The idea of formal cause not only characterises Aquinas’ picture of God, whom he sees as completely actual and without potential, but is also crucial to his theory of knowledge and understanding of human nature. He uses the idea of efficient cause to explain human activity, which is motivated by will, as well as his theory of knowledge about the physical world. The idea of final cause clarifies the nature of the will, which naturally works toward realising its objective of behholding the Divine Essence.
Existence as Superior to Essence:
By choosing Aristotle over Plato, Aquinas altered a thousand years of Christian tradition. Aristotle believed that existence is fundamental, but Plato believed that the essence of reality is what matters most. According to Plato, the objects that make up the world that we see with our senses are just transient and constantly changing. Plato argued that our thoughts must make a conceptual jump from particular examples of objects to universal ideas in order for our observations of the universe to be considered actual knowledge and not merely as anecdotal proof.
He came to the conclusion that there must be an unchanging “essence” that underlies and connects all individual existences. Plato believed that essence is superior to existence, or the ordinary world of things like tables, chairs, and dogs. Early church thinkers compared Plato’s separation of the universe into the naturally corrupt, imperfect world of matter and reality and the ideal and heavenly world of spirit.
Aquinas draws the same conclusion about Plato’s theory as Aristotle, that it is flawed in part because it cannot explain the source of existence and in part because it is too contemptuous of existence. According to Holy Scripture, God observed that the results of each of the six days of Creation were “good” or even “very good.” Furthermore, God says, “I am that I am,” associating himself with being, in response to Moses’ question about how to address him.
God is therefore pure existence, or Being itself.
According to Aquinas, man’s mission is to perfect himself toward Being, not to try to flee from Being. Prior to Aquinas, the conventional church doctrine held that existence was a quality that, by itself, distinguished between God and his creatures. According to Aquinas, there is a difference in degree between God and his creations, and we are distinct from God in that we do not have as much existence as God. Traditional church doctrine held that the biggest barrier to achieving our spiritual destiny before Aquinas was existence. According to Aquinas, improving ourselves is precisely what will lead to the fulfilment of our spiritual destiny.
4) Aquinas and Education:
According to Aquinas, God is both the ultimate goal of education and our Teacher. This does not imply that people cannot learn from one another, but it does affect how we define knowledge and what it means to state that someone has learned. In his tireless pursuit of knowledge and wisdom, Aquinas demonstrates that he is anything but dogmatic; at various points, he is a rationalist and at other times, an empiricist. He never loses the will to learn and comprehend. He is the ideal teacher in this regard. Aquinas asserts that the goal of all education is to advance human happiness (eudaimonia).
5) His Influence in Modern Times:
Some contemporary ethicists have recently discussed the potential application of Thomas’ virtue ethics as a means of avoiding utilitarianism or Kantian “sense of duty,” particularly Alasdair MacIntyre and Philippa Foot (called deontology). Thomas’s idea of purposeful activity in general and his principle of double effect in particular have influenced the work of twentieth-century philosophers like Elizabeth Anscombe (particularly in her book Intention).
In a 2008 paper in the journal Mind and Matter titled “Nonlinear Brain Dynamics and Intention According to Aquinas,” cognitive neuroscientist Walter Freeman makes the claim that Thomism is the philosophical framework explaining cognition that is best compatible with neurodynamics. Thomas is the subject of the final chapter in Henry Adams’ book Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. Adams refers to Thomas as a “artist” and draws numerous comparisons between the architecture of Thomas’s “Church Intellectual” and that of the gothic cathedrals of the time. These opinions would eventually be echoed by Erwin Panofsky in Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951).
James Joyce, a modernist writer who once praised Thomas as being second only to Aristotle among Western thinkers, was greatly affected by Thomas’s aesthetic theories, particularly the idea of claritas. In Girolamo Maria Mancini’s Elementa philosophiae ad mentem D. Thomae Aquinatis doctoris angelici (1898), a theology professor at the Collegium Divi Thomae de Urbe, Joyce makes reference to Thomas’s teachings. For instance, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man mentions Mancini’s Elementa. Umberto Eco, an Italian semiotician who produced an essay on the aesthetic concepts in Thomas, also acknowledged Thomas’s aesthetic influence on his works published in 1956.