-Oh! Thomas Aquinas SUMMA THEOLOGICA
Latino, 1330-1335, Italy Centrale. Scuola Emiliana.
Thomas Aquinas is the thinker through which Christian philosophy in general, and scholastic philosophy in particular, reaches its most finished form. Thomas is a philosopher whose originality rests not on revolutionary discoveries but on his remarkable ability to systematically develop a construction that achieves an imposing synthesis using all the knowledge known at his time. Clarity and respect with which he carries out the exposition of his thought, is not a minor subject. He always starts by raising the problem, then points out the difficulties, objectively presents different opinions and finely demonstrates his own theory.
It is difficult to draw an outline of the totality of his thought, because one should not lose sight of the fact that before a philosopher, St. Thomas was a theologian. His philosophy puts at the service of Christianity, the knowledge developed by Aristotle, which is why it has been called “Christian Aristotelism”.
The fundamental questions that Thomas intends to address throughout his Theological Summa will be:
The solution to the problem between the relations between reason and faith, a solution that represents a model of balance and is the dominant attitude of Christian philosophy and in general in all philosophy that intends to go hand in hand with religious concerns. This problem is known with the two subsequent ones, that is, from their solution results the way to approach them, so that these can be considered as “samples” of theory about reason and faith.
Demonstrations or ways through which one can reach through reason to know the existence of God, and which are a model of rigor in philosophical argumentation.
And thirdly, the nature or attributes of God and his way of knowing them, something that is already at least partially discovered in the “roads”.
“ The whole secret of Thomism rests on this immense effort of intellectual honesty to reconstruct philosophy on a plane such that its agreement in fact with theology seems to be the necessary consequence of the demands of reason itself and not as the accidental result of a simple desire for conciliation”Gilson, E
Historically, the philosophical approach of St. Thomas is determined by the introduction of the doctrine of double truth. While recognizing that faith and rational knowledge are different, he will postulate that they are not opposites but perfectly harmonious. For his docrtine, philosophy and theology have the same object: God. God will be the first cause of every entity and studied mediate natural light (reason) and will also be the end to which the salvation of man is oriented and known through the light above natural of revelation.
While “there” are natural truths, those same truths are “here”, supernatural.
To prove that these are two domains related in harmony, Thomas will be based on the fact that following the writings of a pagan philosopher (which St. Thomas always calls the philosopher) he has been able to reach truths that coincide with faith as the very existence of God. This will be indisputable proof of how far reason can go without the help of faith
Unlike what the supporters of Averroes argued reason and faith are not incompatible since metaphysics and Aristotelian physics would provide rational principles with the help of which a coherent explanation of reality can be constructed, but also open to faith.
Those truths that faith teaches can also be achieved by reason alone (they are the preambula fidei): that God exists, who is one, uncorporeal, etc. And if God has revealed them to us, instead of letting reason discover them on its own, this is because they are precise for our salvation and with intellectual knowledge alone. are hardly achieved: while in principle everyone can know them, in fact only very few know them rationally.
But reason cannot fully land God... for salvation are precise truths that surpass all power of reason and can only be known through revelation, these are mysteries or supernatural truths such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Resurrection... which are not demonstrable in any way and are called articuli fildeli (dogmas).
Without a doubt, rational knowledge is clearer than that of faith, and therefore, as far as the rational reaches, one must prefer such a path. But if by his way of knowledge reason is superior, faith exceeds since his object is infinite: God, who surpasses all that reason can attain.
But philosophy (reason) should not deny revelation, then, but fulfill its own function: to show that mysteries are not irrational but suprarrational, that is, without being opposed to reason, they surpass it.
St. Thomas effectively works in two directions:
Defends the contents of faith by rejecting the objections of adversaries by demonstrating the possibility of such contents.
He seeks analogies between the natural and the supernatural, enlightening faith (eg: the diversity of operations of our soul does not prevent this from being one, it can be glimpsed by analogy that God is one and triune) Therefore, the contradictions between reason and faith are nothing but appearances and just as for the vulgar the earth seems bigger than the sun , the astronomer knows that this is not so, in infinite Wisdom all contradiction between reason and faith disappears.
If, in spite of everything, there was still a conflict between natural and supernatural knowledge, that could only mean one thing: that reason is the victim of error and that it must be corrected, because truth is only one .
