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    Medieval Philosophy: A Practical Guide to Thomas Aquinas
    Medieval Philosophy: A Practical Guide to Thomas Aquinas
    Medieval Philosophy: A Practical Guide to Thomas Aquinas
    Ebook99 pages1 hour

    Medieval Philosophy: A Practical Guide to Thomas Aquinas

    By M. James Ziccardi

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    About this ebook

    This book is one in a series of reviews that has been extracted in its entirety from M. James Ziccardi's "The Essence of Medieval Philosophy".

    It is intended to serve as a primer for students of medieval philosophy with an emphasis on some of the more important philosophical aspects of Thomas Aquinas's "Summa Theologiae".

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherM. James Ziccardi
    Release dateMar 6, 2013
    ISBN9781301683215
    Medieval Philosophy: A Practical Guide to Thomas Aquinas
    Author

    M. James Ziccardi

    M. James Ziccardi lives in Southern California with his wife and daughter and has been a software analyst for over twenty-five years. Reading and writing about philosophy is his passion.

    Read more from M. James Ziccardi

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      Book preview

      Medieval Philosophy - M. James Ziccardi

      Medieval Philosophy: A Practical Guide to Thomas Aquinas

      M. James Ziccardi

      Copyright 2011 by M. James Ziccardi

      Smashwords Edition

      Section 1 - Preface

      The following is one in a series of reviews that has been extracted in its entirety from M. James Ziccardi’s "The Essence of Medieval Philosophy".

      It is intended to serve as a primer for students of medieval philosophy with an emphasis on some of the more important philosophical aspects of Thomas Aquinas’s "Summa Theologiae".

      Section 2 - Notes on the Text

      Square brackets [] found within quotes are mine; Parentheses () found within quotes are Aquinas’.

      Sections in bold type or that are underlined are intended by me to highlight critical points.

      Section 3 - Thomas Aquinas (Biography)

      (1225 – 1274)

      We now turn our attention to the second of the two most prominent medieval philosophers, Thomas Aquinas - the Dominican priest who would one day come to be regarded as the Catholic Church’s greatest theologian and philosopher. Aquinas, or Thomas, as he was commonly referred to at the time, was born into a noble family in 1225 at the Castle of Roccasecaa near the central Italian town of Aquino, in what was then the Kingdom of Sicily.

      Following in the tradition of his day, Thomas attached to his name the name of his birth place, and thus became Thomas of Aquino, and hence Thomas Aquinas. Unlike his brothers and other male relatives, who, like other sons of nobility, were encouraged to pursue military careers.

      Thomas was groomed from an early age to be a monastic leader, and it wasn’t long before his intelligence, tenacity, and theological abilities were noticed by the local clerics, especially among those in the just-forming Dominican Order who were always eager to recruit young scholars. At the time, the newly-formed Monastic Orders, principally the Franciscans and the Dominicans (or Jacobins, as they were called in France), were seen to represent a challenge to the established clerical order of Medieval Europe.

      Thomas began his studies at the University of Naples, where he remained for six years until leaving at the age of sixteen. Shortly thereafter, and somewhat against his family’s wishes, he, with the assistance and intervention of Pope Innocent IV, joined the Dominicans at age seventeen. He continued his education in theology both at the Dominican School in Cologne and at the University of Paris, where he began his studies in philosophy. In 1256, Aquinas was directed to embark on what could be described as a lecturing tour on the issues of theology – a tour which took him to Paris as well as to Rome and various other cities and towns throughout Italy. As his prominence within the Dominican Order rose, his influence in the matters of state rose as well; so much so that he became an advisor to King Louis IX of France and was even awarded a professorship under King Charles II of Naples. It was during this time that Thomas came to write his greatest literary work, the Summa Theologiae, or simply the Summa, which became the basis of the one of the leading schools of thought throughout the Middle Ages, Thomism. Thomism, a form of philosophical realism, was grounded in both Christian teachings, especially those of Paul the Apostle, and Aristotelianism. Aquinas was also deeply influenced by the works of Augustine, Anselm, and Averroes, a contemporary Islamic philosopher from Cordoba Spain who taught what was then considered to be an extreme form of Aristotelianism.

      During the last few years of his life, however, much of Aquinas’ teachings were criticized for their heavy Aristotelian and Averroistic influences. These criticisms greatly troubled Aquinas for the remainder of his life.

      In 1277, three years after Aquinas’ death, Étienne Tempier, the Bishop of Paris, during what were later known as the Condemnations of 1210-1277, officially condemned twenty of Aquinas’ theological propositions as heretical. This was because the propositions were seen as going against the strongly held Augustinian views of the day which maintained that the human intellect is inadequate to understand the will of God.

      It took nearly fifty years for his reputation to finally be restored, when in 1323 Pope John XXII cleared the charges of heterodoxy and made Aquinas a saint. Nonetheless, at the Council of Trent (1545-1563), where the Catholic Church attempted to both clarify its own doctrine and define Protestant heresies, it was the theological teachings of Duns Scotus (who will be reviewed later), and not those of Aquinas, that were turned to for presenting and defending the Church’s positions. Finally, however, at his Encyclical in 1879, Pope Leo XII made Aquinas’ theology the definitive exposition of all Catholic doctrine.

      Among the more noteworthy aspects of Aquinas’ theology are his Quinque viae, or the five ways by which he attempts to demonstrate the existence of God (and which will be presented in the upcoming review of the Summa), and his Via Negativa, in which he attempts to define the qualities of God by showing what God is not.

      The five tenets of the Via Negativa are:

      God is simple, which means that He is not made of parts. As such, God is not a composite of body and soul, or matter and form.

      God is perfect and lacks nothing. That is, God is distinguished from other beings on account of His completeness.

      God is infinite. That is, God is not finite in the ways that created beings are physically, intellectually, and emotionally limited.

      God is immutable, incapable of change on the levels of God’s essence and character.

      God is one, without diversification within God’s self. The unity of God is such that God’s essence is the same as God’s existence. As Aquinas claims: "In itself, the proposition ‘God exists.’ is necessarily true, for in it the subject and predicate are the same."

      Aquinas died from an illness on March 7, 1274 at Fossanova Abby in Lazio Italy while en route to the Second Council of Lyons. He had been directed by Pope Gregory X to attend the council in the hope that he might be able to help settle the differences between the Greek and Latin Churches. Today, Aquinas’ remains are kept in the Church of the Jacobins in Toulouse France. His feast day is celebrated on January 28, the date the Summa Theologiae was first published; however, prior to 1969 it was celebrated on March 7, the day of his death. As a point of interest, there have been centuries-long claims to the effect that Aquinas received visions and messages from the Blessed Virgin, and that he even had the ability to levitate.

      Today, the teachings and writings of Aquinas are regarded not only as significant works of theology and philosophy by the Catholic Church, but by the secular world as well. Indeed, these works have been influential to virtually all subsequent Western philosophers. They have been particularly influential to the likes of Dante, Leibniz, John Locke, and the Irish novelist James Joyce.

      The two works by which Aquinas is best known for are his Summa contra Gentiles, or On the Truth of the Catholic Faith (1258-1264), and his magnum opus, the monumental Summa Theologiae, or Summary of Theology (1265–1274). In the Summa contra Gentiles, Aquinas uses reasoned and philosophical arguments to explain and prove such theological ideas as the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. Hence the work may

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