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General Information
Saint Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican theologian, met the challenge posed to Christian faith by the philosophical achievements of the Greeks and Arabs. He effected a philosophical synthesis of faith and reason that is one of the greatest achievements of medieval times.
Humans know something when its truth is either immediately evident to them or can be made evident by appeal to immediately evident truths. They believe something when they accept its truth on authority. Religious faith is the acceptance of truths on the authority of God's Revelation of them. Despite the fact that this seems to make knowledge and faith two utterly distinct realms, Thomas held that some of the things God has revealed are in fact knowable. He called these "preambles of faith," including among them the existence of God and certain of his attributes, the immortality of the human soul, and some moral principles. The rest of what has been revealed he called "mysteries of faith," for example, the Trinity, the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, the resurrection, and so on. He then argued that, if some of the things God has revealed can be known to be true, it is reasonable to accept the mysteries as true.
Thomas's conviction that truth is ultimately one because it has its source in God explains the confidence with which he approached the writings of non - Christian thinkers: Aristotle, the Muslim Aristotelians Averroes and Avicenna, and the Jewish philosopher Maimonides. He strongly opposed the Latin Averroists who claimed that something can be true in natural knowledge and false for belief and vice versa.
Thomas was critical of the Platonic conception of humans as rational souls inhabiting powerless, material bodies that had been incorporated into the traditional Augustinianism. Like Aristotle, he saw the human being as a complete union of soul and body. Thus, in addition to the survival of the soul after death, the resurrection of the body seemed philosophically appropriate as well as religiously true to Thomas. His Aristotelianism also led to his defense of sense perception and the view that intellectual knowledge is derived by way of abstraction (concept formation) from sense data. Plato's doctrine of Forms, or Ideas, had become part of a traditional Realism with regard to Universals, part of a theory of knowledge that held that humans have direct knowledge of immaterial entities.
Thomas reinterpreted Ideas as divine creative patterns and Saint Augustine's theory of illumination, or the attainment of knowledge of the immaterial through intellectual insight, as a version of the Aristotelian active intellect, which he understood as the faculty of abstracting universal meanings from particular empirical data. Thomas argued that the existence of God can be proved by such reasoning from sense data. He further argued that human concepts and language can be extrapolated, by way of analogy, to speak of God's nature. This, however, is a difficult task, and it is fitting that revelation provides humans with that knowledge. Thomas also held that there are first principles of moral reasoning (Natural Law) that all humans grasp; many of them, however, have been revealed in the Ten Commandments.
Ralph Mcinerny
Bibliography
V J Bourke, Aquinas' Search for Wisdom (1965); M D
Chenu, Toward Understanding Saint Thomas (1964); F C Copleston,
Aquinas (1955); R McInerny, Saint Thomas Aquinas (1977) and, as ed.,
Thomism in an Age of Renewal (1966); J Maritain, The Angelic Doctor
(1958); J Pieper, Guide to Saint Thomas Aquinas (1962).
Thomism is the school of philosophy and theology following the thought of Thomas Aquinas. It developed in various phases and has experienced periods of support and neglect.
When Aquinas died he left no direct successor, but his system was adopted by various individuals, most notably by many of his confreres in the dominican order and by his own original teacher, the eclectic Albertus Magnus. Nonetheless there was still much opposition to his Aristotelianism on the part of church authorities, and in 1277 in Paris and Oxford several propositions derived from Thomas's teachings were condemned. It was primarily due to Dominican efforts that the system of Aquinas was not only eventually rehabilitated, but that he himself was canonized in 1323.
From this time period on, Thomism became one of the several competing schools of medieval philosophy. In particular, it set itself off against classical Augustinianism with its reliance on Aristotle, most eminently by insisting on a unified anthropology whereby the soul is the form of the body. What St. Thomas was to the Dominicans, Duns Scotus became to the Franciscans, and Scotism debated with Thomism on such issues as freedom of the will and the analogy of being. Finally, Thomism, along with the other two schools mentioned, maintained a moderate realism in contrast to nominalism. At the same time, the followers of St. Thomas did not remain uniform, but took on individual traits with particular commentators and in terms of national movements. This tendency is illustrated most interestingly by the Dominican Meister Eckhart (c. 1260 - 1328), who developed a mysticism that was to become characteristic of German theological life for more than a century.
A central figure of developing Thomism was Thomas de Vio Cardinal Cajetan (1469 - 1534). His high ecclesiastical standing contributed to the authoritativeness of his expositions of Aquinas. Cajetan's brand of thomism bears several distinctives. Among these is his analysis of analogy; he argues that this concept is best understood as the proportionality of an attribute to two essences rather than as the predication of an attribute primary in one essence derived in a second. Further, Cajetan thought more in terms of abstract essences than his predecessors, who majored on existing substances. Third, he raised doubt concerning the provability of both God's existence and the immortality of the soul.
Thomism became the leading school of Catholic thought in the sixteenth century. Several factors contributed to its ascendancy. The Jesuit order (approved in 1540), known for its aggressive teaching, aligned itself with Aquinas; also, the Council of Trent (first convened in 1545), swhich self - consciosly styled many of its pronouncements in Thomistic phraseology.
Thomism entered the seventeenth century triumphantly, but exited void of power and originality. John of St. Thomas (1589 - 1644) is a good representative of the early century. He was a creative teacher and interpreter of Aquinas's thought; he was a careful and compassionate official of the Spanish Inquisition; and he was an intimate advisor to King Philip IV. Thus in him the intellectual, theological, and political machinations of Thomism are brought to a focus. But Thomism's primacy bore the seeds of its own demise. Due to lack of competition Thomism became too self - contained to cope with the rise of rationalism and empirical science on their own ground. Thomism would not adapt itself; and so the alternatives left were obscurantism or non - Thomistic philosophy. Consequently, though Thomism was still alive, primarily in Dominican circles, in the eighteenth century, it was essentially a spent force.
But the early nineteenth century saw another abrupt change in the fortunes of Thomism. Catholic thinkers increasingly began to see that in Thomashs works there were viable responses to topical questions not answered elsewhere. Particularly the questions of human dignity in the face of rising industrialism revived Thomism. Dramatically the schools returned to the authority of Aquinas. By the time of Vatican I (1869 / 70), Thomistic principles were again in vogue. And Thomism triumphed in 1879 when Pope Leo XIII in Aeterni Patris recalled the church to St. Thomas. The result was the movement known as neo - Thomism which has persisted well past the middle of the twentieth century.
W Corduan
(Elwell Evangelical Dictionary)
Bibliography
V J Bourke, Thomistic Bibliography: 1920 - 1940; E
Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas; H John,
Thomist Spectrum; T L Miethe and V J Bourke, Thomistic
Bibliography: 1940 - 1978.
thomism
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