When1: 1243
When2: 1273
Who: Thomas Aquinas [Aquinas, Thomas]
What: theologian
Where: Cologne, Germany/Rome, Italy
works\ Commentaries on the Theological "Sentences" of Peter Lombard [1243]; Summation against Gentiles [1264]; Summary of Theology [1273: in two parts, Prima Pars about God as First Cause and Secunda Pars about ethics and people's relations to God. The second part has Prima Secundae about people's purpose and Secunda Secundae about moral choices]
Detail: He lived 1224 to 1274, was Dominican and Aristotelian, and unified Catholic dogma with Aristotle's ideas and logic {Thomism}.
Epistemology
Faith and reason are not contradictory. Both can gain knowledge.
Forms present in someone's mind are concepts and differ from forms present in external things. People can link objects to mind concepts, to make rational judgments. Concepts that exist in mind are true. People can know essences and concepts are universals. Falsity applies only to poor correspondence between thing and mental representation.
Physical organs or organisms have no self-conscious awareness and cannot form or use concepts.
External objects produce sense impressions {phantasm, Aquinas}, in body, that refer to non-perceptual entity {common sense, Aquinas}, which stores and combines sense impressions {cogitative power} to make object-characteristic concepts {image, Aquinas}. Soul becomes conscious of image presence. Memory stores object mental concepts and uses them for sensory recognition. Mind does not know objects, only object mental concepts.
Understanding involves abstracting intelligible essence or form from sensory impression {agent intellect}. Human mind builds from constituent forms of objects that caused sensory impressions. There are no innate ideas. Mind's thoughts and wills are about things, which have intelligible forms or essences.
Animal instincts apprehend things and events as beneficial or harmful.
People can know God through reason, revelation, and intuition. Revealed theology explains doctrines of Trinity, Incarnation, and Last Judgment, which people must accept by faith. Natural theology explains existence of God and soul's immortality, which reason can prove.
Ethics
People can freely have intentions, deliberate, act, and make choices, though God knows past, present, and future. God knows all but is outside time, allowing people free will. Will is power to strive towards the rationally good or desirable and requires intellect to determine the good and desirable. All things are attractive in some respects and unattractive in others, so wills can choose freely among all things.
God created people, and their reason and purpose for being is to return to God. People have other purposes in accord with God's purposes and with natural law.
People must act to gain happiness, though they do not necessarily know what to do. Pursuit of wisdom is the best life course, because wisdom is knowledge of universe purposes, which are the good and the true.
People should contemplate God without will or desire. Happiness is contemplating God.
Secondary causes cause evil, which is unintentional. Evil-act initiating causes are always good. Evil is not an essence.
Prayer is good, but fate is inevitable.
Divine law is to love God and people.
Metaphysics
Because traversals require beginning points and endpoints, traversal of the infinite cannot happen, and universe began a finite time ago.
Universals are real and manifest themselves in individual objects, which are quantitative and exist in space and time. Individuals thus participate in higher reality but are separate from it. Same-species individuals have same essence.
Five ways can prove God's existence by arguing from effect back to cause: prime mover, first cause, supreme being, perfection or highest good, and highest purpose.
However, because people cannot know God's essence, except by analogy with people's essences and thoughts, one cannot argue from cause to effect.
God's knowledge is what creates things. All things that exist, in world or mind, are true. The reason that anything exists is that necessary being, which cannot not exist, exists.
Because God has no parts, God's essence and existence are the same. God has no qualities and is indefinable. God is eternal, unchanging, immaterial, pure activity, good, intellectual, and Truth itself.
God knows all things, but some ideas do not actually exist. God knows singular and particular things, not-yet-existing things, all time, all infinities, all wills, all minds, all evil, and all good. God knows singular and particular things because God is their cause. God knows not-yet-existing things because God is their creator. God knows all time as if it is present time. God knows all good because evil is opposite of good.
God has will that is pure-activity essence. God is object of God's will. God wills universe by reason but without causes or purposes except God, so God can perform miracles but cannot will contradictions. God's will depends only on itself and so is free. God wills Good because God is good and the only good. God acts rationally, so people can know the good through reason.
God cannot sin, change past, make another God, stop itself from existing, or fail. God cannot be body, tire, forget, repent, be sad, or be angry. God has no hate. God is happy. God is its own happiness.
Mind
Living things have souls, which are their essences {substantial form}, but only human beings have spiritual soul. Body has nutrition, growth, and reproduction from one essence {vegetative principle}. Body has sense activity and locomotion from another essence {sensitive principle}. Body has reason and will from a third essence {intellectual principle}.
Spiritual soul connects material and spiritual. Spiritual soul is lowest form with pure intelligence and highest form that can form matter and that realizes in matter. Spiritual soul permeates body and is immaterial, unchangeable, and immortal. Human intellect is in spiritual soul. Spiritual souls are individual, and God creates them at conception. Because soul is purely spiritual, it comes directly out of nothing.
Law
Laws come from God through natural law of morality and society. Natural law does not apply to property. Law must contribute to public good.
Politics
States contribute to God's plan, preparing for the community of believers after the redemption. States are subordinate to church, because states exist to help people reach virtue. Rulers have duties, with no natural right to rule.
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Date Modified: 2022.0224