-About the Author (Wikipedia)
-Book online (Third Millennium Library)
-Chapter on Thomas Aquinas
Intellect
12 hours ago
28.12.10
The Thirteenth; Greatest of Centuries -James J. Walsh
-About the Author (Wikipedia)
-Book online (Third Millennium Library)
-Chapter on Thomas Aquinas
27.12.10
Aquina; A Beginner's Guide -Edward Feser
26.12.10
Foundations of Thomistic Philosophy - A.G. Sertillanges, O.P.
-About the Author (wikipedia)
"Outside God and ourselves, an idea is a thing, while a thing, in us and in God, is an idea. At this stage, this will serve as a reasonably accurate resume of Thomism"
Guide to Thomas Aquinas - Josef Pieper
-About the Author (Ignatius Insight)
-About the Author (Wikipedia)
-Author's Obituary (First Things)
Aquinas Wikipedia page.
"The intellectual dynamics of the early thirteenth century was...determined chiefly by two forces, both revolutionary and both of tremendous vitality: on the one hand the radical evangelism of the voluntary poverty movement, which rediscovered the Bible and made it the guide to Christian doctrine and Christian life; and on the other hand the no less fierce urge to investigate, on the plane of pure natural philosophy, the reality that lay before men's eyes. This latter movement in the direction of a hitherto unknown and novel "worldliness" found ammunition in the complete works of Aristotle, which were at that time just beginning to be discovered.
Both movements contained within themselves sufficient explosive force to shatter the whole structure of medieval Christianity's intellectual order. Both appeared in extremist form - theologically speaking, in the form of heresies. The remarkable thing about St. Thomas, who was exposed to these two intellectual currents while he was still a student at Naples, is that he recognized and accepted the rightness of both approaches; that he identifies himself with both; that he affirmed both, although they seemed mutually opposed to one another; and that he attempted to incorporate both in his own spiritual and intellectual life. The paradigmatic, the exemplary quality of St.Thomas is, as we have said, contained precisely in his refusal to "choose" between the two extreme possibilities. Instead he "chose" both - and did so not by merely tacking one onto the other in a mechanical fashion, but by grasping and demonstrating their inherent compatibility; in fact, by showing the necessity for fusing these apparently contradictory and mutually exclusive approaches to the world."
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23.12.10
The Mind of Chesterton -Christopher Hollis
- About the Author (Wikipedia)
- Chesterton Wikipedia page.
"It is curious that Saint Thomas should be saddled with the responsibility for those purely mechanical and demonstrative proofs of the existence of God i which modern metaphysicians from Kant onwards have been so ready to point out the insufficiences. It is of course true that you cannot demonstrate the existence of God by the mere assertion that it is a condition of thought to believe that everything must have a cause. What then, ask the objectors, can be the cause of God? Such questions may be of force against many of the later, debased scholastics, concerned only to produce the mechanical demonstration and to leave the lecture before a hearer can confront them with a question. They are of no force against Saint Thomas who showed himself as fully aware of such difficulties as any modern skeptic. As Chesterton shows, far from saying that the existence of a creating God was absolutely demonstrable he confessed that, were it not for revelation, he knew of no reason to prefer the belief that the universe was created by God to the belief that it had always existed. But even supposing that it had always existed there must still, he argued, have been in it some inhabiting and creating spirit directing the developing forms which its objects took, and this, in any event true, is yet the more clearly true if, as we are now told, this universe is an expanding universe. Whence comes the expansion? Matter clearly cannot be the creator of mind. The ultimate direction must be with a Mens Creatrix.
Yet among the creatures of the universe Man is so obviously different in kind from any others, and has so much more obviously a moral nature that it is according to reason and not contrary to it to imagine that he has some share in the divine nature as other creatures do not possess. Christian teaching describes this share by saying that Man was made in the image of God and that God in the person of Christ became Man. The fact that these claims, if true, explains the universe as nothing else can explain it, does not in itself prove them to be true as matters of history. The Christian before he accepts his faith is under obligation to examine the evidence of Christ's life and to decide from it whether there is any other explanation that can account for the facts. In the same way, if there is nothing beyond this life or if the future is only the future of Buddha's Sorrowful Wheel, then this life in which we have such obstinate certainties of the value of virtue and of happiness as the end of man, and in which so often virtue does not lead to happiness, does not make sense.
21.12.10
20.12.10
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