Aquinas, Thomas
Aquinas, Thomas
(Born at Roccasecca, near Naples, in 1225; oblate at the Benedictine monastery, Monte Cassino, 1230-1239; student at the University of Naples, 1239-1244; having decided to become a Dominican, he studied at the University of Paris under St. Albert the Great, 1245-1248; until 1252 he was in Cologne with St. Albert at the newly opened studium generale of the Dominican Order; in 1252 he returned to study at the faculty of theology in the University of Paris where in 1256 he was given the licentia docendi in theology and where he taught until 1259; from 1259 until 1268 he taught at the papal curia in Rome; returned to the University of Paris to stem the tide against Averroism, 1269-1272; from 1272 he began teaching at the University of Naples. He died March 7, 1274 on the way to the Council of Lyons.)
St. Thomas was a teacher and a writer for some twenty years (1254-1273). Among his works are
Scriptum in IV Libros Sententiarum (1254-1256), Summa Contra Gentiles (c. 1260), Summa Theologica (1265-1272);
commentaries on Boethius. (De Trinitate, c. 1257-1258), on Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite (De Divinis Nominibus, c. 1261), on the anonymous and important Liber de Causis (1268), and especially on Aristotle’s works (1261-1272), Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, On the Soul, Posterior Analytics, On Interpretation, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption;
Quaestiones Disputatae, which includes questions on such large subjects as De Veritate (1256-1259); De Potentia (1259-1263); De Malo (1263-1268); De Spiritualibus Creaturis, De Anima (1269-1270);
small treatises or Opuscula, among which especially noteworthy are the De Ente et Essentia (1256); De Aeternitate Mundi (1270), De Unitate Intellecus (1270), De Substantiis Separatis (1272).
While it is extremely difficult to grasp in its entirety the personality behind this complex theological and philosophical activity, some points are quite clear and beyond dispute. During the first five years of his activity as a thinker and a teacher, St. Thomas seems to have formulated his most fundamental ideas in their definite form, to have clarified his historical conceptions of Greek and Arabian philosophers, and to have made more precise and even corrected his doctrinal positions, (cf., e.g., the change on the question of creation between In II Sent., d.l, q.l, a.3, and the later De Potentia, q. III, a.4). This is natural enough, though we cannot pretend to explain why he should have come to think as he did. The more he grew, and that very rapidly, towards maturity, the more his thought became inextricably involved in the defense of Aristotle (beginning with c. 1260), his texts and his ideas, against the Averroists, who were then beginning to become prominent in the faculty of arts at the University of Paris; against the traditional Augustinianism of a man like St. Bonaventure; as well as against that more subtle Augustinianism which could breathe some of the spirit of Augustine, speak the language of Aristotle, but expound, with increasing faithfulness and therefore more imminent disaster, Christian ideas through the Neoplatonic techniques of Avicenna. This last group includes such different thinkers as St. Albert the Great, Henry of Ghent, the many disciples of St. Bonaventure, including, some think, Duns Scotus himself, and Meister Eckhart of Hochheim.
To be an Aristotelian under such extremely complicated circumstances was the problem that St. Thomas set himself. What he did reduced itself fundamentally to three points(a) He showed the Platonic orientation of St. Augustine’s thought, the limitations that St. Augustine himself placed on his Platonism, and he inferred from this that St. Augustine could not be made the patron of the highly elaborated and sophisticated Platonism that an Ibn Gebirol expounded in his Fons Vitae or an Avicenna in his commentaries on the metaphysics and psychology of Aristotle. (b) Having singled out Plato as the thinker to search out behind St. Augustine, and having really eliminated St. Augustine from the Platonic controversies of the thirteenth century, St. Thomas is then concerned to diagnose the Platonic inspiration of the various commentators of Aristotle, and to separate what is to him the authentic Aristotle from those Platonic aberrations. In this sense, the philosophical activity of St. Thomas in the thirteenth century can be understood as a systematic critique and elimination of Platonism in metaphysics, psychology and epistemology. The Platonic World of Ideas is translated into a theory of substantial principles in a world of stable and intelligible individuals; the Platonic man, who was scarcely more than an incarcerated spirit, became a rational animal, containing within his being an interior economy which presented in a rational system his mysterious nature as a reality existing on the confines of two worlds, spirit and matter; the Platonic theory of knowledge (at least in the version of the Meno rather than that of the later dialogues where the doctrine of division is more prominent), which was regularly beset with the difficulty of accounting for the origin and the truth of knowledge, was translated into a theory of abstraction in which sensible experience enters as a necessary moment into the explanation of the origin, the growth and the use of knowledge, and in which the intelligible structure of sensible being becomes the measure of the truth of knowledge and of knowing.
(c) The result of this elaborate critique of Platonism is sometimes called the Aristotelian-Thomistic synthesis. It is better, however, to call it simply a Thornistic synthesis, not only because St. Thomas criticized Aristotle on several occasions, but also because the real and historical meaning of Aristotle as a philosopher in the fourth century B.C. is still very much in dispute. In any case it ought to be pretty much beyond dispute that St. Thomas was quite aware that Aristotle was not the author of all the doctrines which he attributed to him.
What St. Thomas appears to have insisted on most in thus using Aristotle as a pillar of his own thought was the rehabilitation of man and the universe as stable realities and genuine causes. This insistence has been by some called his naturalism. Against the tendency of thirteenth century Augustinians to disparage the native ability of the human reason to know truth, St. Thomas insisted on the capacity of the reason to act as a genuine and sufficient cause of true knowledge within the natural order. Against the occasionalistic tendencies of Avicennian thought, which reduced both man and the world of change around him to the role of passive spectators of the sole activity of God (i.e., the intellectus agens), St. Thomas asserted the subordinate but autonomous causality of man in the production of knowledge and the genuine causality of sensible realities in the production of change. Ultimately, St. Thomas rests his defense of man and other beings as efficacious causes in their own order on the doctrine of creation; just as he shows that the occasionalism of Avicenna is ultimately based on the Neo-platonic doctrine of emanation.
This rebuilding of the notion of creature permits St. Thomas also to analyze the problems that Averroism was making more and more prominent. Philosophical truth was discovered by the Greeks and the Arabians neither completely nor adequately nor without error. What the Christian thinker must do in their presence is not to divide his allegiance between them and Christianity, but to discover the meaning of reason and the conditions of true thinking. That discovery will enable him to learn from the Greeks without also learning their errors; and it would thus show him the possibility of the harmony between reason and revelation. He must learn to be a philosopher, to discover the philosopher within the Christian man, in order to meet philosophers. In exploring the meaning of a creature, St. Thomas was building a philosophy which permitted his contemporaries (at least, if they listened to him) to free themselves from the old eternalistic and rigid world of the Greeks and to free their thinking, therefore, from the antinomies which this world could raise up for them. In the harmony of faith and reason which St. Thomas defended against Averroism, we must see the culminating point of his activity. For such a harmony meant ultimately not only a judicious and synthetic diagnosis of Greek philosophy, as well as a synthetic incorporation of Greek ideas in Christian thought, it meant also the final vindication of the humanism and the naturalism of Thomistic philosophy. The expression and the defense of this Christian humanism constitute one of St. Thomas’ most enduring contributions to European thought. — A.C.P.