Thomas Aquinas

Born: 1225

Died: 1274, at the age of 49

Country of origin: Italy

Major Books written by Thomas Aquinas:

• "Summa Contra Gentiles" (1264)
  
  
• "Summa Theologica" (1272) (aka "The Summa")
  
  • The entire Summa can be downloaded as a single PDF file from here.
  
  
• "Compendium of Theology" (1274) (aka "Shorter Summa")
  
  • (A shorter summary of the Summa Theologica, for popular reading, which he wrote in the last 2 years of his life. Unfinished at his death.)

Cocktail summary of Thomas Aquinas' main ideas:

Thomas Aquinas represents the gradual rebirth of Philosophy from its 1,000-year sleep. His task was no less than the grand synthesis of religious faith and rational logic into a single unified whole, and he spent his entire life writing enormous books that addressed every conceivable topic concerning the two. His source for issues of Faith was the Bible and the traditions of the Church, and his source for rational logic was Aristotle. For this reason he made his indellible mark on history, and for this reason he eventually became the source of intense criticism in later centuries.

Greek Philosophy had basically come to an end in the 1st Century AD. The life of the mind, as a discipline independent of any religious, political, or cultural agendas had flourished in Ancient Greece for about 500 years, from around the 400's BC to the middle of the Roman era. But Rome did not value excessive questioning and disloyalty to tradition, and Greek Philosophy basically died out under the culture of Rome that valued order and stability over intellectual boat-rocking, and allowed intellectual pursuits only in so far as they served the interest of the state.

When the Church rose to prominence in the 4th Century it inherited this Roman tradition of Philosophy-hitched-to-an-agenda, and encouraged rational thinking within a certain context, but only as long as it was fully subservient to religious doctrine. More important than intellectual ponderings was moral repentance and personal faith. The purest path to true knowledge was Faith, serving as the pilot which guides Reason. Novelty was not a virtue, and independent thought was viewed with suspicion, often considered a sign of disloyalty and disrespect for inherited authority, as was common in pretty much every other culture on earth at the time. This mindset continued for about 800 years through the Dark Ages in Europe, until the middle of the 12th century.

During this span of 800 years, European thinkers had access to only a small portion of ancient Greek philosophy, including some of the works of Plato and a couple of surviving works of Aristotle, but it wasn't much to work with. If Christian writers made use of ancient Greek philosophy at all it was mostly in the form of Plato and his mystical ideas of the "Forms" and the perfection of heaven and the corruption of the physical world, which writers such as Augustine had found condusive to Christian doctrine of the time. This produced a prolonged focus on eternal things, and a disregard for the "lesser" things of the physical world.

While this extended period of Platonic pondering is often portrayed as a period of stagnation of dry doctrine and an easy tool for abuse of power, it actually served a constructive period during the Dark Ages in Europe. During this time most of Europe was repeatedly invaded by Vikings from the North and Asian horsemen from the East, in the form of Huns, Mongols, Avars and various other unpleasant barbarians. This totally destroyed the unity of the Roman past and splintered Europe into a fractured Feudalism that took over 1,000 years to recover from. The Doctrines and Creeds of the Church served as something of a guiding light during a very dark period. The Creeds of the Church acted as a sort of road-map to guide the ethics and hopes of the faithful during a time when most people assumed that total destruction was around the corner. The physical world was full of suffering and destruction, so it was perhaps constructive that people were encouraged to hope for the future and the afterlife, as opposed to focusing on the suicidal atmosphere of the time.

But in the 1100's, Europe's increasing contact with the Muslim world, especially in Spain during the era of the Moors, and as a result of the Crusades, brought European thinkers into contact with the full corpus of Aristotle and the Philosophers of ancient Greece, which had never been lost in the Arabic-speaking world. By the mid-1200's Europe once again had in its possession the entire library of Aristotle's writings, who came to be called simply "the Philosopher".

During the Dark Ages in Europe, the Muslim world had preserved the writings of the ancient Greeks through translations into Arabic, and they had used them to develop their own doctrines and scientific ideas. They had made room in their theology for intellectual questioning largely independent of religious doctrine, at least in Spain. As these works were translated into Latin, European writers began to re-think their own tradition of keeping intellect stictly subservient to doctrine.

Both Islamic and Jewish philosophers in Spain used the ideas of Aristotle to analyze their respective doctrines in rationalistic terms. The rise of the Universities in Europe produced Christian thinkers who set out to do the same with their doctrine. Rationalism and Logic came to be seen as a tool rather than a threat.

Most of the academic work done in the European universities at this time was done by the monsastic orders, such as the Franciscans and the Benedictines. The Dominican order was new in the 1200's and their primary values were a vow of poverty and an emphasis on learning. One of their members was an Italian monk named Thomas Aquinas, and it was during this avalanche of newly recovered works by Aristotle that he first set his mind a-thinking and his quill a-writing.

Whereas those before him were mostly compilers of, and commentators on, ancient Greek philosophy, Aquinas built on these ideas and integrated them into Church doctrine and created entirely new ideas. This in itself was a risky undertaking, since the Church still approached rationalizing of religious doctrine with hesitation and distrust. In fact, after his death Aquinas' writings were placed on the list of banned reading-material for the next 50 years, due to their dangerously new ideas, with Aquinas being called a "radical Aristotlian". Ouch.

Aquinas' fundamental contribution to the history of ideas is this: he argued that humanity is bestowed by God with 2 basic faculties, our moral faculties and our rational faculties. Both of these come from God, and therefore both serve as two equally reliable roads to one common truth. Therefore, there can be no ultimate contradition between the two, since he argued that the mind of God is fundamentally rational. The full extent of God's rationality is beyond the grasp of the human mind, but those aspects that are within our grip are consistently rational. Many things are beyond the grasp of human reason, but *no truth is contrary to reason.* There are not 2 truths - one truth of faith and another truth of reason. Faith and reason are but 2 roads to the same one truth, Aquinas argued.

He argued that Faith and Reason were intertwined like 2 vines, both forming a unified approach to truth. Philosophy and Theology were 2 sides of 1 coin, the peanut-butter and jelly in the sandwich of life. When we are thinking we are believing, and when we are believing we are thinking, he argued.

One inevitable side-effect of this idea was that "pure" philosophy was to be distrusted, since it is divorced from its other half of truth. Pure Rationalism was viewed as being equally as incomplete as the mindset of the Dark Ages in which only mystical Faith was emphasised. Mysticism and pure Philosophy were viewed as 2 opposite sides of the spectrum of knowledge - with the two sides of the spectrum being personified by Plato at the mystical side and Aristotle at the down-to-earth practical side - so pursuing Philosophy on nothing but rationalistic presumptions was stifled by the status quo of the time. Therefore, while Aquinas lit the spark that was the rebirth of Philosophy, it was intimately intertwined with religious doctrine, which would cause problems for thinkers in later centuries who wished to more fully separate the 2 realms of knowledge.

The Church Establishment of the time was nervous about the rediscovery of Aristotle and the emphasis on Rationality for 2 basic reasons:


- Truth, as defined by Augustine/Plato was already established. Rationalizing it served no purpose other than to argue with non-Christians. And this was not advised: non-Christians needed to simply accept the authority of Scripture and accept the Truth, and not worry about rationalizing it. No one rationalized the earth, it was just there, regardless of philosophy. The truth of God was eternal, and the "created order" would eventually be destroyed. So questions about the here-and-now were sort of like re-arranging the furniture on the Titanic: a curious distraction, but irrelevant.

- As in most of the rest of the world at the time, most authority in Europe was "vertical", not "horizontal". Society was hierarchical, from the King down to the Aristocracy to the Church and down to the Masses. Truth and Tradition and Ideas flowed downwards, not upwards, most of the time. If the king declared war, or the Aristocracy raised taxes, or the Church interpreted ultimate Truth, none of this was open to discussion. The captain of a ship decides where to turn the ship, and the crew turns the ship. This view of society was considered efficient, had existed since the beginning of time, and ensured that society was managed in a tidy fashion.


But Aquinas argued that since all men possess rational minds that were made by God, which all operate according to the same kind of basic logic, questions of Truth can be analyzed and questioned and rationalized by individuals at all levels of society. He saw this as an excellent tool to convince Jews and Muslims and Pagans of the obvious truth of the Scriptures. Reason was the great social equalizer, with the lowest peasant theoretically being able to discuss theology with any Arch-Bishop. This was a dangerous idea at the time, and threatened to change the way society was managed.

What's often forgotten is that this "vertical" view of society was shared by almost every other culture on earth in the 13th century. A survey of every major culture around the planet at the time - from China and the Mongols, to the empires in India, to the Russian states, to the major Islamic cultures of Africa and the sub-Saharan kingdoms of Zimbabwe and Mali, to the Aztecs and Incas in the Americas, to Japan and the other developed cultures of the Far East - show that not a single one of these cultures placed much value on dissent, not to mention the countless tribal cultures throughout the world at the time. Loyalty was rewarded, rocking the boat wasn't. New ideas were viewed with suspicion in all cultures around the world, where loyalty vs. dissent usually equalled life vs. death.

Perhaps the only exception during this time was one small corner of the Islamic world: Moorish Spain. It was from here that Aristotle was largely re-discovered by Christian Europe, and Muslim scholars like Averoes and Avicenna were living in a unique intellectual period in Muslim history, in which they were allowed to try to rationalize Islamic doctrine using Greek philosophy. Southern Spain at this time was something of a religious free-trade zone for a while, where Islam, Judaism, and Christianity freely exchanged ideas in a relatively tolerant environment.

However, this liberal attitude died out in Islamic culture after a few centuries. The mixture of Faith and Reason never took root in the Islamic world as it did in Christian Europe, serving as more of a curiosity in a unique corner of the Islamic world, with little practical effects in the rest of the Muslim world at large. It served to develop the field of mathematics and astronomy, but it never produced anything resembling the explosion of science and medicine and technology that would emerge in Europe in later centuries under their Judeo-Christian mindset.

Aquinas' ideas in Europe at the time were met with suspicion by his peers, which to modern eyes is seen as disgraceful and embarrassing. But the key difference between his environment and the philosophical environment of most other cultures at the time was that he was allowed to speak and write in the public square of ideas. He was criticized and even threatened, but the rules of the game in the intellectual public square in Europe at the time were liberal enough that a certain amount of dissent was tolerated, compared to previous eras and compared to most of the rest of the world. Had he lived in most any other major culture at the time he would likely have been quickly silenced. The entire history of philosophy in the West is, to a large extent, simply the history of the tolerance of dissent.

This "horizontal" argument of Aquinas - that the masses are equally capable of rationalizing Truth as the highest rungs of the Church or State - was the first step in the long history of social and scientific change that was to happen in Europe in later centuries. If the mind of God was rational, and the created minds of humans were rational, then perhaps the created world was rational as well. Therefore, asking questions about nature and science was not an act of disloyalty, but could be seen as simply discovering signs of God's handiwork. And since humans have "dominion over the earth", tinkering with nature was simply following the mandate of God to Man in Genesis. The first small step towards the eventual creation of television had been taken.

Aquinas also argued that human Reason, independent of Faith, can determine certain truths, like the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. These facts can be discovered by even the most un-Christian Pagan. But Faith completes Reason.

Some of Aquinas' ideas.

These are some of Aquinas' ideas that have been developed and built upon in later centuries, with several still very much alive in the modern age:


• Natural Law.
  
  This is the idea that there is a basic set of "rights" and ethics that applies to all people in all cultures. This idea was famously used by Thomas Jefferson when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, arguing that there are certain inalienable rights that are to be recognized for all men. Martin Luther King Jr. used the idea of Natural Law to argue against prejudice between the races, insisting that this violated the basic laws of human society that govern all societies, Christian or not. It is sort of like an ethical version of the laws of nature: they have their source in God, but they are independent of the ethical laws specific to Christians. It is the basis of modern ideas of Human Rights and the belief that every individual is guaranteed certain basic freedoms of expression, belief, and ambitions. While largely taken for granted today, this idea was new at the time of Aquinas.
  
  
• A "Just War".
  
  The idea of a just war - a war that is fought according to certain ethical quidelines - was first codified by Aquinas. The term "just war" was coined 800 years earlier, by St. Augustine in his book "City of God", in reference to the idea that waging war can in some instances be seen as a noble act, such as when coming to the rescue of the oppressed. But Aquinas spelled out the details, such as the proper treatment of prisoners of war, practicing different standards towards civilians compared to soldiers, and the pre-conditions that must be met prior to a war being considered "legitimate".
  
  Aquinas specified 3 conditions that must exist before a nation can justly engage in war:
  
  
  • There must be a just cause. This is probably the biggest opportunity for creative interpretation by an aggressor, but it states that the aggressor must be avenging an obvious wrong done against it, or be re-claiming something that was stolen from it, such as territory. A war cannot be considered "just" if it is an act of adventure, empire-expansion, or nation-building.
    
    
  • A war must be declared by a "just authority". Again, this is an easy clause to creatively re-interpret, but Aquinas was referring to Kings or members of a royal family, as opposed to some land-owner waging war on another country. Naturally, any aggressor considers themself the "just authority", but Aquinas argued that only certain authorities may ethically be responsible for war.
    
    
  • A war must be fought with "just intent". The intent of any war must be to establish justice or right a wrong. A war cannot be considered "just" if the intent is simply a lust for power or blind revenge.
  
  
• The problem of Evil.
  
  Probably the oldest question in Christianity, this was his answer to the question of why a good God would allow for the existence of Evil. Is God limited in some way, or is he possibly not entirely good?
  
  Aquinas answers this by arguing that the very act of creation, by God or by humans, will always have the effect of a separation of quality between the creator and the created. When a carptenter makes a bookshelf, or a writer pens a story, the created items may be good but they will not be identical to the creator in their essence. There is always the possibility that the bookself will warp, or that the story will not fully express the writer's original idea. Likewise, when God created the Universe it was a thing separate from himself. God didn't extend a part of himself "outwards" and call it the Universe, he created it as something separate from himself. Therefore, this creation as distinct from the creator didn't possess the same essence as God. It reflected God's essence, and had a purpose bestowed by God, but it was something different from God.
  
  Therefore, if Evil is defined as an action contrary to the will of God, God can never be the source of evil, but since his creation is distinct from himself yet fully possessing free will, the possibility of choosing an evil act is always possible. If God prevented this, and the Universe was perfect and non-evil in every respect, then the Universe would simply be an extention of God, not a creation by him.
  
  Aquinas conceded that, since God chose to create an autonomous humanity that was given the possibility of choosing Evil, God *is* in one sense the source of Evil, due to the fact that he is the source of creation. But the source of a possibility isn't the same as the source of that possibility's execution, any more than a parent is fully responsible for the choices of their child.
  
  
• The necessity of the Incarnation.
  
  Aquinas spent quite a lot of time arguing for why the Incarnation was necessary, but one of his more creative suggestions was that it was the most efficient way for God to forgive all sins past and present.
  
  God technically didn't have to incarnate himself and suffer a legalist reading of his own divine justice - he could have stayed in heaven and waved his arm and forgiven the world, and asked everyone to just get along. But since sin happens a lot, God would have to do this constantly. Therefore, Aquinas argued, if God stuck to his own rules and appeared on Earth and went through the Crucifixion just once, this would efficiently take care of all possible forgivenesses in one act. It was much more efficient than having to forgive humans every time they violated the divine law, so God was just practicing good time-management.
  
  
• Indulgences.
  
  This is another doctrine that Aquinas was not the originator of, but he argued for it in great detail and came to be heavily associated with it during the later Protestant Reformation. His name was all over this idea in the 16th century to such an extent that Martin Luther even publically burned Aquinas' "Summa Theologica" because of his support for Indulgences, Luther's favorite target.
  
  Basically, the idea goes like this: Every sin has 2 consequences, a spiritual punishment and a physical punishment. While only God can forgive the spiritual realm, the physical realm can be atoned for by a Christian via either prayer, service to the Church, or by abstaining from something. Aquinas argued that all of the good works of the Apostles and other saints far exceeded their own needs, so these good works are stored in heaven. They form a sort of bank, from which the church can make withdrawels to apply to the penitent Christian. This applies to service to the Church: if you do good works for the Church, the Church can forgive you of the physical effects of certain sins (the so-called "venial sins", those of lesser importance.)
  
  This, of course, was ripe for abuse and came to be used a sort of bribe: if a Christian donated enough money the Church would bestow upon them forgiveness, creating an attractive loophole for abuse. This was a big cause of Martin Luther's Reformation, but was still a pretty benign practice during the life of Aquinas.
  
  
• Concomitance.
  
  This is the idea that the entire sacrifice of Christ is present in *either* the bread or the wine. Both are not needed when taking Communion in order to receive the full effect of Christ's sacrifice. This is as opposed to the counter-argument that Christ's spiritual redemption is present in the wine but his physical redemption is present in the bread, and therefore both are needed to get the full effect. Concomitance states that both are present in either element, and is the reason why only the wine is served during Mass in many Catholic churches.
  
  Aquinas wasn't the first person to suggest this doctrine, but he spelled out the arguments for it in clear detail and has come to be associated with it.
  
  
• The Immaculate Conception.
  
  This was the idea that if the Virgin Mary was sinless, her own conception from her parents must also have been sinless. And since the Original Sin of Adam was, Aquinas argued, passed to all humans at conception through the male "seed", this presented a problem regarding how Mary could be free of Original Sin, as was the assumption. Was Mary's father or mother free from Original Sin, therefore making Mary's sinlessness not unique?
  
  Aquinas argued that Jesus represented not a new creation, but the redemption of the original creation of Adam. If God had sent Jesus to Earth out of thin air and produced a brand new creation of a new humanity, this would have doomed the original creation. God's intent was to redeem the first one, not start over from scratch. Therefore, Jesus had to be created from the same physical matter that the first creation was made from - he had to be "born of a woman", and not simply be a spirit that looked human. He had to pass through the same birth process that all humans are created through. But this had to somehow happen free from the Original Sin that all humans are stuck with as a result of conception.
  
  Therefore, Aquinas argued that when Mary's parents conceived her, God somehow intervened and allowed the conception to proceed but blocked the passage of Original Sin. This was supposedly the only time God ever did this, but this allowed Mary to be born in the natural way, but free from any spiritual stain. Thus, she became a perfect and pure vessel through which God could take matter and incarnate himself.
  
  Thus, contrary to the popular useage of the term, the Immaculate Conception doesn't refer to Mary's pregnancy but her mother's pregnancy.
  
  
• The "Five Ways" proofs of God.
  
  These are Aquinas' attempts to prove logically the existence of God, using 5 analogies to illustrate his arguments. They all revolved around one basic idea taken from Aristotle - the idea of the "un-moved mover". Aquinas' Five Ways are:
  
  
  • #1. Argument from motion. This is his reference to motion and change in nature, which Aristotle explained as being a long sequence of cause and effect, leading back to an ultimate un-moved mover, which initiates all motion and all change. As Aristotle had argued, this first initiator of all motion in Nature is God. Aquinas conceded that this doesn't necessarilly prove the Christian God, but he aruged that it proved the existence of a God.
    
    
  • #2. Efficient cause. This is his reference to cause-and-effect in general. He argues that no cause causes itself, but is caused by some other cause that initates the effect. He extends Aristotles idea back to God, arguing that he is the ultimate cause of all effects.
    
    
  • #3. Possibility and necessity. This is his argument that all possibilities of existence have to come from somewhere. He says, "That which does not exist only begins to exist by something already existing." Basially, the idea for something comes from somewhere, and this source of all existence (which Aquinas separates into "possible" existence and "necessary" existence) come from God.
    
    
  • #4. The "gradation" found in things. This is his reference to the idea of Universals, or standards against which all particular things are measured. For instance, he argued that when we say that one flame is hotter than another flame, we are implying that there is an ultimate scale by which hotness is measured, above and beyond both flames. When we say that someone is more noble, or an idea is more true, then we are referring to universal scales against which these particulars are measured. The source of all of these universal standards is God.
    
    
  • #5. The governance of the world. This is his analogy to directed motion, such as an arrow being shot from a bow is always directed by someone, never flying on its own initiative. Natural bodies always require some kind of intelligence to direct their motion. The ultimate intelligence that guides all things in nature is God.
    
    

The Scholastics:

Ever since the Renaissance, the word "Scholasticism" has been associated with an effort to try and harmonize ancient philosophy with Christian theology. This has usually had a negative connotation, portraying the effort as similar to forcing a square block into a round hole. While an ultimate harmony between Rationalism and Christian doctrine was the goal of thinkers like Aquinas, Scholasticism was actually a technical word that referred to a specific way of teaching.

Aquinas was the most famous of the so-called "Scholastics". The Scholastics, or "Schoolmen", practiced a form of teaching which was both a method and a style. The method was a form of teaching that was practiced in Medieval universities: some argument would be made, then followed by all possible objections, with each one analyzed and tossed out until the final, most rational solution was left. Such as, the statement "God exists" would be followed by "No he doesn't", or "Yes he does, but he is limited", etc. and each objection would be analyzed. This was considered a Medieval method of education, but it has never really died out, being used often up into the modern era.

But the term Scholasticism more often refers to a style. In later centuries after Aquinas, particularly during the Renaissance and Enlightment years, the term was associated with a style of teaching which was more interested in theorizing than in experiment. Ideas were referred to in one book and then defended by appealing to other books. If Aquinas said the sky was blue this was proven by referring back to Aristotle, rather than by looking out the window to verify it personally.

The term "Scholasticism" came to refer to a mindset that was obsessed with relentless abstraction and with defending ideas by referring to older ideas from ancient books, rather than taking into account newer ideas or direct observations of nature. An idea would be argued by arguing, rather than by observing. Ideas were defended by referring to older ideas, which were defended by referring to even older ideas, until the students' eyes glazed over.

The stereotypical Scholastic textbook might state an assumption like "nature abhors a vacuum", or "the circle is supreme in nature". The ancient Greeks argued that there is no such thing in nature as a true vacuum - a total absence of matter in a given area - and that any movement of one object around another, like the motion of the moon around the Earth, would always be in the form of a perfect circle. These two ideas were taken for granted since they sounded good, and they appealed to people who liked the neat, tidy perfection of mathematics. Something is always more comforting than Nothing, and a circle is always more "perfect" than any other looped shape.

So when Galileo later discovered that the earth and other planets orbit around the sun, he assumed that these orbits were in the shapes of perfect circles. (Scholasticism took a long time to die out). Since mathematics was the guiding hand of all nature, the circle was assumed to be the guide that defined the orbits of planets. Only later was this found to be false, with planets orbiting in oval orbits around the sun, not circular ones. Observations like this were nails in the coffin of Scholasticism, as the term had come to be used, and Schoolmen like Aquinas came to be stereotyped as little more than outdated sources of hot air.

Due to this sterotype of the methods of Aquinas, the Renaissance and the later Enlightenment often identified themselves in opposition to Scholastism. These later eras argued for experiment and observation and scientific verification, much of which showed older ideas to be wrong or misleading. If a later thinker drifted into too much theorizing and referring to the ideas of other thinkers, he would be accused of "Scholasticism". While this wasn't an entirely accurate use of the word, it came be be used in almost universally negative tone by the 17th century. This, in spite of the fact that much of modern Philosophy is practiced in a Scholastic fashion, with modern ideas falling far outside of the possibility of proof or verification, and their arguments coming from extended theorizing against the ideas of other modern ideas. It is simply Scholasticism under another name.

Incidentally, while Aquinas was associated with Aristotle, the Renaissance and later eras often associated themselves instead with Plato. These so-called "Neo-Platonists" looked back behind the Rationalism of Aristotle and found the Idealism of his mentor, Plato. Plato's ideas about the "Forms" and pure ideas that existed above the corrupted physical world appealed to Renaissance thinkers as a more pure form of thinking than Aristotle's, which was often bogged down in details of nature. However, what seemed to have escaped many of these later thinkers was the fact that Plato had dominated European thinking for almost 800 years, ever since Augustine.

Thomas Aquinas praised & criticized:

• Thomas Aquinas has had enough critics and defenders to deserve a place in the record-books. Of his critics there have been many. One of the basic criticisms of him, and the so-called school of "Scholasticism" that he represented, was his view that all knowledge had already been discovered. Aquinas and the "Schoolmen" argued that Truth and Facts were basically a closed system, and the effort of philosophy and theology was simply to sort out the details and iron out any misunderstandings.
  
  Therefore, the science of Aristotle and the ancient Greeks was inherited at face-value and was endorsed by the Church and State. When Aristotle argued that there are 4 basic elements - Air, Earth, Fire, and Water - then this argument was endorsed by the Church and State. When he argued that the sun revolves around the earth, and that the universe is eternal and has always existed, these ideas were also endorsed by the Church and State. Anyone who argued otherwise was being disloyal to the eternal Truth of God and was rocking the boat of society.
  
  This resulted in a growing road-block to the development of science. As people spent more time studying nature they began to realize that some of the ideas of Aristotle were simply wrong. Gradually, the consensus among many thinkers, especially during the Renaissance, was that if the science of Aristotle and, by extension, Aquinas was wrong, perhaps other ideas in the Scholastic System were wrong as well. Aquinas eventually came to represent an encrusted orthodoxy that stood in the way of the very science and rationalism he had originally endorsed.
  
  Aquinas has also been criticized from another angle, focusing on his elevation of role human Reason as compared to Faith. During the Dark Ages in Europe, issues of Faith far-outweighed issues of Reason. Rationality and, therefore, Philosophy were buried under a Faith that was Platonic - focused on the eternal realm of God and Heaven and on Revealed Truth from Scriptures. This had the effect of mostly ignoring most issues of the "mortal realm" - nature, science, the day-to-day world, and the "flesh", which included the the human mind and its logical functions. Science was almost non-existant and even technology was something that existed in the past under Rome, with many related skills having been forgotten.
  
  Aquinas represented the resurrection of rationality, but this resurrection was of a very specific type. Ever since Augustine in the ### century, the Fall described in Genesis was considered as being "complete". The entire human condition had fallen from its intended design. Both "the Will" and the rational faculties of humanity "fell" in Eden. Church doctrine argued that the Crucifixion redeemed humanity but that he was still fallen. The Will and the Mind were still short of their original design and function.
  
  But Aquinas split this idea in two: he saw the Fall of Genesis as being partial, affecting the moral Will of humanity, but not the intellect. When the Fall of humanity occured in the Eden story, the rational mind remained essentially intact, he argued. He conceded that the human mind will always be limited, and there are certain truths that transcend our ability to ever understand. But he argued that even these truths are rational and that we are still able to use logical Reason to discover many truths, even independent of the Revealed Truth of Scripture.
  
  This last detail was one of his most significant ideas, and that which caused most of this troubles. He argued that certain truths, like the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, were obvious even to pagans who asked the questions using consistent, logical steps. There were other truths, which he called #### truths, which could only be known via Revelation in Scripture, such as the Trinity, the dual-nature of Christ, and the redemptive nature of the Crucifixion.
  
  The criticism comes from this view of rationality as being autonomous. He argued that Faith completes Reason, but his un-leashing of Reason set the stage for the eventual transformation of Reason into Rationalism a few centuries later, and into the Modern era. Becoming an "ism" meant that Reason eventually stood on its own feet, so to speak, and attempted to approach all of Truth from Reason only, totally independent of Faith. This led eventually to the abandonment of Reason in the early 19th century, with the birth of Existentialism, and the post-Rational climate of the so-called Post-Modern era.
  
  Aquinas has been criticized for basically giving Reason too much freedom, and not creating a proper balance between Faith and Reason. The later Protestant Reformers attempted to tip the scales back into a more balanced position in later centuries, with varying success. But since Aquinas represented the doorway from the Dark Ages to the rebirth of Philosophy, the resulting "ism" has been placed at his feet; if not Aquinas' feet himself, at least at the feet of his Scholasticism and the resulting Rationalist backlashes that followed it.
  
  During the Renaissance, many people caricatured the Scholastics as arguing "how many angles could fit on the head of a pin". Most of them were thinking of Aquinas when this was said, although he never actually addressed this particular question. So the question is still an open one, for any modern Thomists out there looking for a thesis topic.
  
  The defenders of Aquinas, usually called "Thomists", have long aruged that Aquinas represents the healthiest possible balance between Reason and Faith in the modern world. Pope John Paul II has called Faith and Reason "two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth". In an age where most people view Reason as representing a small corner of knowledge, such as Mathematics, but having little relevance to issues like God, morality, politics, or personal choices, the balanced view of Aquinas gives Reason its proper role. While Rationality isn't the sole foundation of all knowledge, it has far more relevance than modern thinkers give it, and the modern age would do well to look to Aquinas to find the proper balance.

Notable Facts about Thomas Aquinas:

• Religious affiliation:
  Thomas Aquinas' entire world was religion. Without religion he was nothing. Where Christian doctrine would be today without him is questionable. He moved doctrine and theology out from the almost exclusive dominance of Faith and blind trust and into the world of rational philosophical explanation.
  
  
• Thomas Aquinas' last name wasn't Aquinas. He actually had no last name. Like some modern rock-stars, he had just one name, Thomas. He was born in the town of Aquino, so his name is technically Thomas of Aquino. But the town's name has forever been attached to his one name, so he has posthumously been awarded a last name.
  
  
• Aquinas was born to be famous. His parents were members of the Italian nobility of the time, his father a Count and his mother a Countess. His family was related to several royal families throughout the German states, France, Spain, and England. His uncle was an Abbot of a Benedictine monstary, and his family was a friend to the Popes. He had no choice but to become a celebrity.
  
  
• Aquinas has the honor of being considered one of the so-called "33 Doctors of the Church". He is often referred to as "The Angelic Doctor".
  
  
• Aquinas gained fame for an incident involving a prostitute and a firebrand. When he was 5 years old his family had sent him to a Benedictine monstary to study, with the expectation that he would later join the order. He would be following in his uncle's footsteps, and would, by association, be paying back a family-debt to the Church, due to a previous murky incident in which the family was involved in an earlier military incident involving Church property being destroyed. But when Aquinas was 16 years old he decided quit and join the newly-created Dominican order instead, attracted by their emphasis on academic learning.
  
  His family was horrified, considering the new order to be a type of cult, and his older brothers kidnapped him and kept him locked in a castle for over a year, trying their best to "de-program" him from his cultish ways.
  
  They even locked him in a room one night with a prostitute, in an attempt to get him to renounce his "virtue". But the valiant monk held firm and he refused her wiley advances, even grabbing a red-hot firebrand from a fireplace and threatenting her with it. He claimed that, after she gave up and left the room, he locked the door and used the firebrand to scratch a cross on the back of the door. He then knelt and prayed that God would grant him life-long "integrity of mind and body". He then fell asleep and was visited by 2 angels who told him that "We bestow upon you the girdle of perpetual virginity", wrapping a burning rope around his waist, causing him great pain but also great strength. For some reason he considered this girdle of virginity a gift from God and claimed to never feel the slightest interest in "carnal affairs" for the rest of his life. Tom was no Cassanova.
  
  After his family's attempt at reforming their cultish son failed he was released, it was rumored, only after the Pope himself intervened. Supposedly, Aquinas' sisters helped him escape his 2-year imprisonment by tying a rope to a tower and lowering him out a window in a basket. It must have been a very big basket...
  
  Aquinas then went to Paris and joined the Dominican cult, ...I mean order, and remained with them his entire life. He was said to have never been in the company of women until the day he died, when he was tended to by a nurse on his deathbed. Perhaps his burning girdle loosened a bit on his deathbed, because he asked that the Song of Solomon be read to him from the Bible, in all of its language of romance and passion.
  
  
• Only 2 books were referred to at the Council of Trent: the Bible and Summa Theologica.
  
  
• Aquinas is the official patron saint of students, and the namesake of countless Catholic schools.
  
  
• The word "Thomist" refers to any set of ideas that uses the methods of Thomas Aquinas to explain theology. For instance, a modern-day Thomist usually refers to someone who attempts to rationalize points of doctrine using only philosophical language. This is opposed to any approach that stresses Faith or emotion or any other method to explain doctrine. The term usually has an old-fashioned implication to it, since Philosophy in general has largely lost interest in pure Rationalism, ever since the early 1800's with the rise of Existentialism. 21st Century Philosophy is in a sort of trans-Rational state these days.
  
  
• While Aquinas was long considered the offical teacher of universal Catholic doctrine (the so-called "Doctor Communis") it wasn't until 1879 that he was officially declared the source for official Catholic teaching, by Pope Leo XIII. It was declared that Aquinas should be referred to regarding any doctrinal issue that has not been specifically addressed by any Church Council or Papal Encyclical. This view has been re-affirmed as recently as 1998, by Pope John Paul II in his Encyclical "Faith and Reason", and remains the offical recomendation of by the Vatican to this day.
  
  
• Aquinas was canonized in 1323 by Pope John XXII.
  
  
• Aquinas was a celebrity his entire adult life. Despite spending a lot of time writing, he also spent a lot of time teaching, preaching, attending councils, getting involved in the political affairs of his monastic order, and often being consulted by Popes and Kings. Everyone wanted a piece of Aquinas.
  
  Aquinas' cousin was the Holy Roman Emperor. His second-cousin was Frederick II, the "Wonder of the World".
  
  Aquinas' great-uncle was Red Barbarossa.
  
  
• Aquinas' intellectual stature was more than amply reflected by his physical stature. He was nicknamed "The Dumb Ox" by his fellow-monks, since he wasn't exactly gregarious ("dumb" referring to his rarely speaking) and he was very fat (like an ox). Rumor has it that his fellow-monks built a special table for him in which part of the front of it was carved out in a half-circle shape, so that Aquinas could sit closer to the table, accomodating his immense stomach.
  
  
• Aquinas was once offered the position of Archbishop of Naples in 1265, by Pope Clement IV. But he turned down the offer, preferring to focus on his writing and his thinking.
  
  
• Aquinas never finished writing his massive book "Summa Theologica" due to experiencing a vision while celebrating Mass one day. On December 6th, 1273 he was struck by a vision of such intensity that he decided to lay down his quill and never write another word again. When he was encouraged to keep writing anyway he said, "I can do no more. Such secrets have been revealed to me that all I have written now appears to be as straw". He was dead within 3 months, at the age of 49.
  
  
• Aquinas died on March 7, 1274 while on his way to attend the Council of Lyons, which had been called into session by Pope Gregory X. He collapsed on the way, in the town of Terracina, and was taken to a monastery where he supposedly said, "This is my rest for ever. Here will I dwell, for I have chosen it."
  
  Aquinas is buried in more than one place. One of the more popular hobbies in the Middle Ages was collecting saints' "relics", which usually meant their body-parts. Aquinas' right arm is located in Rome, in the Church of St. Maria Sopra Minerva. His left arm is located in the Cathedral of Naples. The rest of him is located in Toulouse, France, in the Church of St. Sernin. "You want a piece of me?" was taken very literally back then.
  
  
  

Quotes:

• "The whole community of the Universe is governed by divine Reason."
  
  
• "Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder."
  
  
• "Human salvation demands the divine disclosure of truths surpassing reason."
  
  
• "Most men seem to live according to sense rather than reason."
  
  
• "Reason in man is rather like God in the world."
  
  
• "It is impossible for items that belong to Reason to be contrary to those that pertain to Faith."
  
  
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