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Thomas Aquinas Concludes His Word on Summa Theologiae – 1272

1272 Thomas Aquinas Concludes His Word on Summa Theologiae

“The Dumb Ox” – that was the name given by his college classmates to the heavy, quiet, and serious lad from the Count of Aquino’s family. They might never have guessed that the Ox would produce eighteen huge volumes of theology, nor that the theological system he constructed would become an official theology of Catholicism.

The greatest theologian of the Middle Ages was born about 1225 to a wealthy and noble family. At age 5, the pudgy boy was sent to the school at the nearby monastery of Monte Cassino (the community founded by Benedict seven hundred years earlier). At age 14, Thomas went to the University of Naples, where his Dominican teacher so impressed him that Thomas decided he, too, would join the new, study-oriented Dominican order.

His family fiercely opposed the decision (apparently wanting him to become an influential and financially secure abbot or archbishop rather than take a friar’s vow of poverty). Thomas’s brothers kidnapped him and confined him for fifteen months; his family tempted him with a prostitute and an offer to buy him the post of Archbishop of Naples.

All attempts failed, and Thomas went to Paris, medieval Europe’s center of theological study. While there he fell under the spell of the famous teacher Albertus Magnus, also known as Albert the Great.

Thomas’s Educational Climate

In medieval Europe, the idea of “secular education” had not occurred to anyone. All learning took place under the eye of the church, and theology reigned supreme in the sciences. Yet Thomas lived in a time when nonChristian philosophers were stirring the minds of many thinkers. Aristotle the Greek, Averroes the Muslim, Maimonides the Jew- their (and others’) works were being translated into Latin. Scholars were fascinated …

A Taste of Thomas
With systematic seriousness, the doctor answers a key question of faith: If God predestines, why should we pray?
Thomas Acquinas

Objection 1: It seems that predestination cannot be furthered by the prayers of the saints. For nothing eternal can be preceded by anything temporal; and in consequence nothing temporal can help towards making something else eternal. But predestination is eternal “¦
Objection 2: Further, as there is no need of advice except on account of defective knowledge, so there is no need of help except through defective power. But neither of these things can be said of God when He predestines. Whence it is said: “Who hath helped the Spirit of the Lord? Or who hath been His counsellor?” (Rom. 11:34) “¦
Objection 3: Further, if a thing can be helped, it can also be hindered. But predestination cannot be hindered by anything. Therefore it cannot be furthered by anything.
On the contrary, It is said that “Isaac besought the Lord for his wife because she was barren; and He heard him and made Rebecca to conceive” (Gen. 25:21). But from that conception Jacob was born, and he was predestined. Now his predestination would not have happened if he had never been born. Therefore predestination can be furthered by the prayers of the saints.
I answer that, Concerning this question, there were different errors. Some, regarding the certainty of divine predestination, said that prayers were superfluous, as also anything else done to attain salvation; because whether these things were done or not, the predestined would attain, and the reprobate would not attain eternal salvation. But against this opinion are all the warnings of Holy Scripture, exhorting us to prayer and other good works “¦
So, as natural effects are provided by God in such a way that natural causes are directed to bring about those natural effects, without which those effects would not …
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A Mingling of Minds
Why was one of Christianity’s best thinkers so ready to learn from a Muslim and a Jew?
David B. Burrell

The work of Thomas Aquinas may be distinguished from that of any of his contemporaries by his attention to the writings of Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), a Jew, and Avicenna, (980-1037) a Muslim. His contemporaries, especially in Paris, were responsive to the work of another Muslim, Averroes (1126-1198), for his rendition of Aristotle, but Aquinas’s relation to Averroes and to those who took their lead from him was far more ambivalent.

Aquinas respected Rabbi Moses and Avicenna as fellow travelers in an arduous intellectual attempt to reconcile the horizons of philosophers of ancient Greece, notably Aristotle, with those reflecting a revelation originating in ancient Israel, articulated initially in the divinely inspired writings of Moses. So while Aquinas would consult “the Commentator” (Averroes) on matters of interpretation of the texts of Aristotle, that very aphorism suggested the limits of his reliance on the philosophical writings of Averroes, the qadi from Cordova.

With Maimonides and Avicenna his relationship was more akin to dialogue, and especially so with Rabbi Moses, whose extended dialectical conversation with his student Joseph in his Guide of the Perplexed closely matched Aquinas’s own project: that of using philosophical inquiry to articulate one’s received faith, and in the process extending the horizons of that inquiry to include topics unsuspected by those lacking in divine revelation.

We may wonder at Aquinas’s welcoming assistance from Jewish and Muslim quarters, especially when we reflect on the character of his times: the popular response to the call to arms of the Crusades as well as a nearly universal impression on the part of Christians that the new covenant had effectively eclipsed the old.

Aquinas …

From Interfaith Dialogue to Apologetics
Thomas respected Muslims’ knowledge of philosophy, but their misconceptions about Christianity concerned him deeply.
Thomas Acquinas

Thomas respected Muslims’ knowledge of philosophy, but their misconceptions about Christianity concerned him deeply. When the Cantor of Antioch wondered how to explain Christianity to local Muslims, he asked Thomas Aquinas. Thomas answered the cantor with Reasons for the Faith Against Muslim Objections, excerpted below. The translation was provided by Joseph Kenny, O.P., a professor of religious studies at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.

The following are the things you say the Muslims attack and ridicule: They ridicule the fact that we say Christ is the Son of God, when God has no wife (Qur’?n 6:110; 72:3); and they think we are insane for professing three persons in God, even though we do not mean by this three gods.

They also ridicule our saying that Christ the Son of God was crucified for the salvation of the human race (Qur’?n 4:157-8), for if almighty God could save the human race without the Son’s suffering he could also make man so that he could not sin.

They also hold against Christians their claim to eat God on the altar, and that if the body of Christ were even as big as a mountain, by now it should have been eaten up.

On the state of souls after death, you say that the Greeks and Armenians hold the error that souls after death are neither punished nor rewarded until the day of judgment, but are in some waiting room, since they can receive no punishment or reward without the body. To back up their error they quote the Lord in the Gospel (Jn. 14:2): “In my Father’s house there are many places to live in.”

Concerning merit, which depends on free will, you assert that the Muslims and other nations hold that God’s fore-knowledge or decree imposes necessity on human actions; thus they say that man cannot die or even …

Did You Know?
Interesting and unusual fact about Thomas Aquinas

Trounced

In this detail from Andrea di Bonaiuto’s fourteenth-century fresco The Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas, heretics Averroes and Arius crouch beneath the enthroned Aquinas. Averroes (also called Ibn Rushd; 1126-1198) was a Muslim philosopher who, according to Aquinas, made a hash of Aristotle and led many medieval Christians astray. Arius (c. 250-c. 336) denied Christ’s full divinity by positing that “there was [a time] when the son was not.”

Aquinas participated in no physical crusades against heresy, but he did believe that heretics “deserve not only to be separated from the Church by excommunication, but also to be severed from the world by death.”

Fancy meeting you here
Aquinas and several of his enemies make appearances in James Joyce’s daunting 1922 novel Ulysses. In chapter one, a character is asked for his views on Hamlet but replies, “I’m not equal to Thomas Aquinas and the fiftyfive reasons he has made to prop it up. Wait till I have a few pints in me first.” Arius, Sabellius (the third heretic at Aquinas’s feet in The Triumph), Averroes, and Moses Maimonides pop up as well.

Heeding the call
Franciscans in Assisi will soon enjoy a new feature in their habits: cell phone pockets. Some critics consider the innovation inappropriate, but Elisabetta Biancheri, who designed the habits, said, “It is simply a functional item of clothing. Even monks make phone calls.” Biancheri is right about the phones, but she shouldn’t call Franciscans “monks”- they’re friars, and, as Thomas well knew, there is a difference.

Word-aholic
Thomas did not even live to see his fiftieth birthday, but he produced an enormous body of writing: more than 10,000,000 words in some 60 …

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On this day…

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