Thomas Aquinas

“ THE WRITTEN LAW "The laws of nature," says St. Thomas Aquinas, "and all principles of justice and morality, were almost effaced in the time which elapsed between Adam and Moses. At the time of Abraham, all nations had fallen into idolatry. They were plunged into all sorts of vices. Almost all shut their eyes to the light of reason. They were like one who is falling into an abyss. The deeper he falls, the less day-light he sees. God permitted the wicked to fall into this state of universal ignorance and impiety, in order to humble their pride and arrogance. ”

“ Thomas Aquinas, which is authorized by the Church; and whoso has ever deviated from his doctrine, said Pope John XXII., has always been suspected as to his faith (fuit semper de fide suspectus) . How would you think then of introducing any reform in such matters? Certainly, all the lecturers and masters would to a man rise against it. For my part, I cannot see why the system hitherto adopted should not be still pursued: our Order has been always distinguished for its theologians, and this distinction they derive from the study of the 'Summa Theologiæ' of St. Thomas Aquinas. ”

“ Thomas Aquinas, "to assert that he believes in Jesus Christ. To believe in a man is to give our full assent to his word and to all he teaches. True faith, therefore, is absolute belief in Jesus Christ and in all he has taught. Hence he who does not adhere to all that Jesus Christ has prescribed for our salvation has no more the doctrine of Jesus Christ and of his Church, than the Pagans, Jews and Turk's have." "He is" says Jesus Christ, "a heathen and publican." ”

“ Thomas Aquinas do with the mythology of Brahminism, he who set forth all the science and rationality and even rationalism of Christianity? Yet even if we compare Aquinas with Aristotle, at the other extreme of reason, we shall find the same sense of something added. Aquinas could understand the most logical parts of Aristotle; it is doubtful if Aristotle could have understood the most mystical parts of Aquinas. Even where we can hardly call the Christian greater, we are forced to call him larger. But it is so to whatever philosophy or heresy or modern movement we may turn. ”

“ Thomas Aquinas. St. John Chrysostom and St. Athanasius represent the Greek doctors. St. Leo, who saved Rome from Attila, is with peculiar propriety placed in the Vatican; and St. Thomas Aquinas, the angelic doctor, naturally finds a place in a chapel painted by a Dominican for a pope who particularly favoured the Dominicans,—Nicholas V.
The Four Fathers communing on the mystery of the Trinity, or the Immaculate Conception, were favourite subjects in the beginning of the seventeenth century, when church pictures, instead of being religious and devotional, became more and more theological. ”

“ In fact, Thomas Aquinas, the leading theologian and doctor of the Church of Rome, lays down the following doctrine, which his Eminence, and others of his school, seem45 very ready to act upon. "It is," says he, "much more grievous to corrupt faith, which is the source and life of the soul, than to corrupt money, which only tends to the relief of the body. Hence, if coiners and other malefactors are justly put to death, by the secular authority, much more may heretics not only be excommunicated, but put to death." ”

“ Unquestionably, Thomas Aquinas was not the original framer of the Romish doctrines: they were already produced, and he did no more than defend and explain them. The most ingenious of theologians, he possessed a rare faculty of persuasion; so that if instead of the doctrines he undertook to defend, he had had others placed before him, still more opposed to the truth, he would equally well have reconciled them at once to the Holy Scriptures, and to the teaching of Aristotle. ”

“ Thomas Aquinas, the “Angelical Doctor” (1225–1274) , towers over all the theologians of his own or of any other age. He is unsurpassed in knowledge of Holy Scripture, the Fathers, and Aristotle, in the depth and clearness of his ideas, in perfection of method and expression, and in the variety and extent of his labours. He wrote on every subject treated by the Schoolmen, and in every form: on physics, ethics, metaphysics, psychology; on apologetic, dogmatic, moral and ascetical theology; in commentaries on Holy Scripture, on Aristotle, on the Areopagite and the Lombard ”

“ In the days of Abelard, and again in those of Thomas Aquinas, Realism had been the orthodox philosophy, and Aquinas in demonstrating that the abstract and general truths of Christianity were acceptable to the reason did the Church of his day a great service. But another realist had come after him, who had most trenchantly attacked St. Thomas, destroying all the reasonableness of the great Doctor’s philosophic structure, and emphatically ousting the reason and substituting the authority of the Church as the only sure guide in the sacred mysteries of religion, the only sure foundation of faith. ”

“ The fundamental questions pertaining to God, the Trinity, the mission and divinity of Christ, original sin, free-will, grace, predestination, had been formulated by Thomas Aquinas with as much severity as by Calvin. The great subjects at issue, in a strictly theological view, were Justification and the Eucharist. Respecting free-will and predestination, the Catholic theologians have never been agreed among themselves,—some siding with Augustine, like Aquinas, Bernard, and Anselm ”

“ Now it is manifest that he who adheres to the teaching of the Church, as to an infallible rule, assents to whatever the Church teaches; otherwise, if, of the things taught by the Church, he holds what he chooses to hold, and rejects what he chooses to reject, he no longer adheres to the teaching of the Church as to an infallible rule, but to his own will. Hence it is evident that a heretic who obstinately disbelieves one article of faith, is not prepared to follow the teaching of the Church in all things ”

“ The Pope and the clergy saw in Thomas Aquinas the great defender of the Church,—not of its abuses, but of its doctrines. And if no new light can be shed on the Scripture text from which assumptions were made; if these assumptions cannot be assailed, if they are certitudes,—then we can scarcely have better text-books than those furnished to the theologians of the Middle Ages, for no modern dialetician can excel them in severity of logic. The great object of modern theologians should be to establish the authenticity and meaning of the Scripture texts on which their assumptions rest ”

“ This at once started a new dispute, which they pursued a great way, upon the extent and limitation of the moral and natural attributes of God—That controversy led them naturally into Thomas Aquinas, and Thomas Aquinas to the devil.
The stranger's nose was no more heard of in the dispute—it just served as a frigate to launch them into the gulph of school-divinity—and then they all sailed before the wind.
Heat is in proportion to the want of true knowledge. ”

“ Thomas Aquinas was one of the first men to write in defense of it. In his day the expression excited much opposition. Pope Innocent III, ambitious to establish a number of superstitions, called the fourth Council of the Lateran, A. D. 1215, which declared that “the church has always understood that an entire confession of sins was always appointed by the Lord, and that it is of divine requirement necessary to all who have lapsed after baptism. ”

“ Thomas Aquinas must in general principle at least, be the groundwork of the teaching of philosophy and theology as they are to form the minds of future Catholic apologists.
The scholastic theology and philosophy of the Thirteenth Century have come to us in absolute purity. The huge tomes which represent the indefatigable labors of these ardent scholars were well preserved by the subsequent generation which thought so much of them, and in spite of the absence of printing have come down to us in perfectly clear texts. ”

“ From Thomas Aquinas, who was not only a mighty Schoolman but also a canonised Saint of the Roman Church, we may clearly hope to derive the very best and most accurate instruction as to the real tenets of his Communion. Now this writer, through the medium of a syllogism professedly framed upon an authorised Prayer in the Breviary, establishes the DUTY of worshipping the cross with the self-same adoration as that which is paid to the Deity.
We offer the supreme adoration of Latria to that Being, in whom we place our hope of salvation. ”

“ Thomas Aquinas on them, the decisions of the Church on them, are of necessity, and from the very nature of things, inadequate, because, being philosophical developments, they are made in an age when the forces for true philosophical development are waning or wanting. ”

“ In his treatise, Libri sententiarum, mainly based on Augustinian doctrine, we find a distinct softening of the antithesis between nature and grace and an anticipation of the union of Aristotelian and Christian thought, which was initiated by Albert the Great and completed by Thomas Aquinas.
The moral philosophy of Aquinas is Aristotelianism with a Neoplatonic tinge, interpreted and supplemented by a view of Christian dogma derived chiefly from Augustine. All action or movement of all things irrational as well as Thomas Aquinas. ”

“ Thomas Aquinas, “is something far above the faculties of the human soul; nay, it is something even far above the natural faculties of an angel. The soul, therefore, must be pre­pared for the contemplation of the Divinity. ”

“ He does not seem to have ever applied himself [Pg vii] to the study of the Fathers.... As has already been stated, the whole work (The Ascent of Mount Carmel) is based upon the view S. Thomas Aquinas takes of the essence and operations of the senses and of the faculties of the soul, and upon his treatise on the virtues." [1]
S. Thomas hardly needs an imprimatur after six centuries of full trust. But in the hard matters of mysticism, which he has treated as a scholar should, it is reassuring to know that he has the approval, not only of the scholars, but of the mystics. ”

“ Now something is made not only from its contrary, but also from that which is opposite to it, either by negation or by privation: thus white is made either from black or from not-white. We indeed from being sinners are made holy: so that our sanctification is a cleansing from sin. Whereas Christ, as man, was made holy, because He was not always thus sanctified by grace: yet He was not made holy from being a sinner, because He never sinned; but He was made holy from not-holy as man, not indeed by privation, as though He were at some time a man and not holy ”

“ Later, Thomas Aquinas, Professor of Theology at the University of Paris, created a poetical counterpart in his hymns, to the prose exposition of dogma. No one else reached his stature in this particular but hundreds of European clerics having theological degrees or a partial preparation for them, were active in the church and in secular life. It is only fair to suppose that they must be included in the great anonymous group which assisted in making that unique contribution to medieval literature which was preserved in contemporary liturgical collections. ”

“ Further, "as the rational soul and flesh are one man; so God and man are one Christ," as Athanasius says (Symb. Fid.) . Now man is not said to be subject to himself or servant to himself or greater than himself because his body is subject to his soul. Therefore, Christ is not said to be subject to Himself because His Manhood is subject to His Godhead.
On the contrary, Augustine says (De Trin. i, 7) : "Truth shows in this way" (i.e. whereby the Father is greater than Christ in human nature) "that the Son is less than Himself." ”

“ Thomas Aquinas gave all his thoughts to bringing science again under the sway of the theological bias, metaphysical methods, and ecclesiastical control. He gave to the world a striking example of what his method could be made to produce. In his commentary upon Aristotle's treatise upon "Heaven and Earth" he illustrates all the evils of such a combination of theological reasoning and literal interpretation of the Scriptural with scientific facts as then understood, and it remains to this day a prodigious monument to human genius and human folly. ”

“ Thomas Aquinas, whose overshadowing authority superseded all his predecessors, and who brought canon and dogma into a permanent system still in force, lays down the rules with merciless precision. Heretics, he tells us, are not to be tolerated. The tenderness of the Church allows them to have two warnings, after which, if pertinacious, they are to be abandoned to the secular power, to be removed from the world by death. ”

“ Thomas Aquinas not only treated with incomparable logic the vexed questions of scholastic philosophy, but brought all the resources of a noble and well-trained intelligence and of a fine moral sense to the study and determination of the order and government of the universe, and of the nature and destiny of man. ”

“ Even in those precepts which direct us to God, some are moral precepts, which the reason itself dictates when it is quickened by faith; such as that God is to be loved and worshipped. There are also ceremonial precepts, which have no binding force except in virtue of their Divine institution. Now God is concerned not only with the sacrifices that are offered to Him, but also with whatever relates to the fitness of those who offer sacrifices to Him and worship Him. Because men are ordained to God as to their end ”

“ Now the Holy Ghost taught the apostles all truth in respect of matters necessary for salvation; those things, to wit, that we are bound to believe and to do. But He did not teach them about all future events: for this did not regard them according to Acts 1:7: "It is not for you to know the times or moments which the Father hath put in His own power."
Reply Obj. 3: The Old Law corresponded not only to the Father, but also to the Son: because Christ was foreshadowed in the Old Law. Hence Our Lord said (Jn. 5:46) : "If you did believe Moses, you would perhaps believe me also ”