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... to restore theology to the mainstream of science
Thomas Aquinas
(1224-1274)
Aquinas combined ancient Greek and Medieval science with Christian belief to produce a theological classic, the Summa Theologiae. Aquinas For me the high point of the Summa is his treatment of the Trinity, the Christian belief that there are three divine Persons in the one God. Aquinas explains that although the relationships of knowledge and love are not real among us, they are in god. Reading this set me thinking about one god with an unlimited number of personalities, many of which are visible to us.
Aquinas was a member of the Order of Preachers, founded by Dominic Guzman with the aim of combating 'heretics' on their own intellectual ground. Albert the great (1206-80) Aquinas' teacher, was a man of encyclopaedic knowledge of contemporary science, philosophy and theology. He realized that Christianity needed to be aligned with Aristotelian teachings if it was to maintain its credibility. Aquinas brought this task to fruition in the Summa.
Christian readers of the New Testament were able to discern three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, in God. Here they departed from the monotheism of the Jewish religion from which Christianity evolved. Each of the persons of the Trinity is assigned a specific role in the salvation of mankind, the Father Creator, the Son the Sacrificial Lamb who redeemed us and the Holy Spirit, who infuses us with knowledge of the ways of god.
The existence of the Trinity was formally asserted by the earliest Christian creeds. These documents grapple with the problem of how to reconcile the unity of God with the Trinity of persons. To a large degree, this difficulty was overcome by asserting that it was simply a mystery to be believed.
Aquinas managed to go further. He developed his model of god from Aristotle's writings about the "unmoved mover", "potential" and "actual" reality. The key idea is that something potentially existent cannot realize itself. It must be brought into being by something already actual. Since we often see potential events becoming real, there must be a purely actual being making this happen. This being, he concludes, we call god.
From this property, that God is "pure actuality" the fulfillment of all possibility, Aquinas derives the traditional attributes of God: simplicity, perfection, goodness, infinity, eternity, unity, omniscience, omnipotence and so on.
Although God is eternal, and therefore from our point of view unchanging, Aquinas was able to show that a living god is consistent with the notion of 'pure act'. He then proceeded to develop the doctrine of the Trinity, taking as his starting point the Aristotelian theory of knowledge and love.
Intellectual knowledge is encapsulated in an inner 'word'. While in us, the word is simply a quality of mind, in God it is a really distinct entity, the Son. This identification of word and Son is consistent with the prologue to John's gospel:
In the beginning was the Word:
the Word was with God
and the Word was God. John 1:1.
Similarly, the love of the Father and the Son for one another leads to the existence of the third person, the Holy Spirit. The real distinction of the three persons are the result of the generative relationships they hold to one another. Although relationships among created things are accidental, in God they are real. Aquinas 166
Aquinas' doctrine of the Trinity is the starting point for our hypothesis that the universe is divine. Instead of just the three divine persons, we see God as distinguished by real relationships into all the distinct entities that we see around us. This distinction, however, does not mean that the universe is neither one nor perfect, any more than the Trinity reduces the perfection of God in the Christian model.
Below, Aquinas' model of God based on his psychology of human knowledge and desire is developed as a transfinite network, a model of the communication based relationships between all the elements of the divinity.
Further reading
Books
| Aquinas, Thomas, and Kenelm Foster, Sylvester Humphries (translators), Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima, Dumb Ox Books 1959 A translation of William of Moerbeke's latin text of Aristotle's On the Soul (a brilliant little treatise on life written 2300 years ago) together with a latin commentary by the Angelic Doctor Thomas Aquinas. Here is an ancient foundation for the Christian belief in the immortality of the soul. Amazon back |
| Aquinas, Thomas, and Richard J. Blackwell, Richard J. Spath, W. Edmund Thirlkel (Translators), Commentary on Aristotle's Physics, Dumb Ox Books 1999 An English translation of Aquinas latin commentary on the William of Moerbecke's translation of Aritotle's Physics. Amazon back |
| Aquinas, Thomas, and Ralph M. McInerny (Preface), John P. Rowan (Introduction), Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics, Dumb Ox Books 1995 An English translation of Aquinas latin commentary on the William of Moerbecke's translation of Aritotle's Metaphysics. Amazon back |
| Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica (translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province), Tabor Publishing 1981 'Brother Thomas raised new problems in his teaching, invented a new method, used new systems of proof. To hear him teach a new doctrine, with new arguments, one could not doubt that God, by the irradiation of this new light and by the novelty of this inspiration, gave him the power to teach, by the spoken and written word, new opinions and new knowledge.' (William of Tocco, T's first biographer) Amazon back |
| Chesterton, G K, Saint Thomas Aquinas: the Dumb Ox, Image Books 1974 Jacket: 'G K Chesterton's brilliant sketch of the life and thought of Thomas Aquinas is as relevant today as when it was first published in 1933. ... Cherterton's Aquinas is a man of mystery. Born into a noble Neapolitan family, Thomas chose the life of a mendicant friar. Lumbering and shy - his classmates dubbed him "the Dumb Ox" - he led a revolution in Christian thought. Amazon back |
| Haberman, Jacob, Maimonides and Aquinas: A Contemporary Appraisal, KTAV Publishing House 1979 Amazon back |
| John, and Alexander Jones (editor), in The Jerusalem Bible, Darton Longman and Todd 1966 Introduction to Saint John: '[This] gospel has a complex literary form: it is akin to the earliest Christian preaching, and yet at the same time it gives the final results of a quest ... for a deeper and more rewarding apprehension of the mystery of Jesus. Each of the evangelists has his own approach to Christ's person and mission. For St John, he is the Word made flesh, come to give life to men, 1:14,and this, the mystery of the Incarnation, dominates the whole of John's thought.' p 140. Amazon back |
| Torrell, Jean-Pierre, and Robert Royal (translator), Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Person and his Work (Volume 1), Catholic University of America Press 1996 Publisher: 'First published in 1993 as Initiation saint Thomas d'Aquin: Sa personne et son oeuvre, this volume offers a thorough introduction to the life and works of Thomas Aquinas as well as a sustained reflection on the spiritual aspects of his life and teaching. ... Jean-Pierre Torrell reviews, clarifies, and frequently modifies previous scholarly conclusions on Aquinas's life and works. He presents the person of Thomas Aquinas in his complete familial, social, and intellectual context, summarizes the known events and circumstances of Aquinas's life, discusses the contents of his works, and provides a catalog of those works in an appendix. ... Thomas's daring originality is brought out clearly in the final two chapters, which describe the controversies in the years immediately after his death, the condemnations and rehabilitation of a few of his positions, and the process leading to canonization. This volume is the first of two on Thomas Aquinas to be written by Torrell. The second, which explores further the spiritual aspects of Aquinas's teaching, is completed in French and awaits translation into English.' Amazon back |
Links
| Aquinas 166 Summa: I 28 2 Whether relation in God the same as His essence? 'Now whatever has accidental existence in creatures, when considered as transferred to God, has a substantial existence, for there is no accident in God, since all in Him is His essence. ...' back |
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