St. Thomas Aquinas: Philosophy, Faith, and Reason
Item 7: Scholastic Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas
1. Socio-Historical Context
He lived in the thirteenth century, when the Papacy became the main Western power, above the empire. Yet the imperial comes from God, so he’s rebelling against God.
2. Relationship Between Faith and Reason
Thomas says that original sin weakened humanity, so he needs divine grace (the gift that God gives you access to the faith) for salvation and to perfect human nature. Faith and reason do not vanish, but working together, respecting each area and defending the autonomy of each, but never able to contradict. There are three truths:
- Natural truths: Scientific-philosophical truths that can be accessed only with reason.
- Preambles of faith: They are natural and revealed truths necessary for salvation, and that can be known by reason (natural theology) or by faith, as not all are able to reach it rationally (Sacred Theology).
- Articles of faith: God has revealed truths knowable only through faith. Are studied in Sacred Theology.
The reason faith can help in three ways:
- In natural theology reason can demonstrate the preambles of faith.
- The Sacred Theology reason can clarify (not show) revealed truths.
- The reason may refute the objections of other philosophers and theologians showing that they are false or have no strength.
3. Proof of the Existence of God
- Via the movement: Everything that moves is moved by another (Aristotle), so I need a stationary engine that moves everything else, and that is God.
- Route of efficient causality: Nothing can be the efficient cause of itself, because that would be produced before, and so on, so I need a first cause, God.
- Track what is necessary and contingent: There are contingent entities that may or may not be, so if you have not been, you must give them something being, and therefore requires a necessary being itself, God.
- Route of the degrees of perfection: There are things more or less perfectly; the maximum degree of minors cause is God.
- Via the order and causation (of teleology): The natural things are directed to an end, something impossible if they were not governed by a Being endowed with intelligence, God.
4. Explanation of the Structure of Reality: The Thomistic Ontology
Aquinas distinguishes between essence and existence:
- Contingency and composition of essence and existence. All beings are composed of essence and existence. The contingent realities are those that exist but may not exist, which means that their existence does not necessarily belongs to its essence, therefore consist of separate essence and existence. Necessary beings can not not exist, so the essence and existence identified.
- Existence as an act of being The essence is the power, and existence is the act. The existence unfolds at different levels of perfection, for example a human being is more perfect than an animal, and this more than a plant. Aquinas concludes that the self or the reality of God is unlimited and perfect, for in Him essence and existence identified. On the contrary, are entities created or imitate the existence of God in different degrees of perfection.