Thomas Aquinas

So my question is, can a finite person doing finite things for a finite number of years deserve a punishment that is literally infinite? Defenders of the traditional view say yes.

One classic argument from medieval thinkers like Anselm or Thomas Aquinas is that the weight of a crime depends on who you offended.

And offending an infinite God is an infinite offense.

Others say that the damned never stop rejecting God, so the punishment never stops

Super cool.

So when I graduated from undergraduate, I took a trip to Europe and I specifically went to the South of France to visit Thomas Aquinas.

Yeah, I've been there.

And dragged my like evangelical buddy with me.

Yeah, there was

a modern photography exhibit there when I was there.

Anyway, this is all to say, join my campaign to get Thomas Aquinas moved somewhere better.

We've been thinking the same

Nora talked about how impactful it was just to see the pope go by and to actually hear him address them in English.

If you put yourself in the shoes of a 16-year-old, you spend your mornings reading Dante and Aquinas in a small classroom in Illinois, and then suddenly you are standing in Bernini's massive colonnade in Rome.

surrounded by hundreds of peers doing the exact same thing.

Listening to the Pope.

They are reading the primary sources, the absolute heavyweights of Western thought.

Okay.

They are tackling Homer, Plato, Dante, St. Thomas Aquinas, and of course, G.K. Chesterton.

Okay.

Their imaginations were not yet disturbed and disquieted by thoughts of space and time, without end and without beginning.

aquinas such was the world of nature the theatre for that world of grace which revelation spoke of and which led eventually to the eternal world of glory in which the faithful should have their portion natura gratia gloria was the ascending series like another set of celestial spheres and the whole economy was elaborated into a logical system known to the historians of thought as scholasticism a philosophy which found its most perfect and memorable expression in thomas aquinas twelve twenty seven to seventy four the doctor angelicus of catholic theology canonized less than fifty years after his death the summa philosophica where aquinas deals with the rational foundations of a christian theism and the summa theologica where he erects his elaborate structure of theology and ethics together constitute one of the most magnificent monuments of the human intellect dwarfing all other bodies of theology into insignificance in him the erudition of an epoch found its spokesman he was the personification of an intellectual ideal to his contemporaries he stood beyond the range of criticism in the paradiso it is st thomas who speaks in heaven Nevertheless, the scholastic world-scheme, though based on the evidence of the senses, the investigations of antiquity, and the authority of the Church, and though Aquinas had set the seal of finality upon it, was destined to gradual discredit and ultimate extinction.

Disintegration begins.

It was open to attack on two sides.

31.

Though St. Thomas Aquinas may not have covered all the facts when he called man a contemplative animal, 32, he came nearer the mark than more modern anthropologists.

Man has an ineradicable impulse to transcendence, though sometimes, as we may admit it, it is expressed in strange ways, and no psychology which fails to take account of it can be accepted by us as complete.

He has a craving which nothing in his material surroundings seems adequate either to awaken or to satisfy, a deep conviction that some larger synthesis of experience is possible to him.

Love is for them much more than its emotional manifestations.

It is the ultimate cause of the true activities of all active things, no less.

This definition, which I take as a matter of fact from St. Thomas Aquinas, 134, would be agreeable to the most modern psychologist.

He might give the hidden steersman of the psyche in its perpetual movement towards novelty a less beautiful and significant name.

You ready? I am.

Would you rather debate theology with Thomas More or or discuss philosophy with Thomas Aquinas?

Okay, I think I'm going to pick Thomas more.

Because I think that would be an interesting conversation.

I'm actually torn on, I've talked to myself into both answers on this one.

Cause I was like, Thomas Moore was a humanist.

So he would have read Thomas Aquinas and he, his works were popular with humanists.

So I'm like, is, is it just going straight to the source? Or could you learn a lot about him through Thomas More?

They're going to have to overturn the canon episcopi, and that won't be easy.

In this discussion, St. Thomas Aquinas doesn't really prove to be terribly influential, which is surprising given that he's utterly influential in every other regard vis-a-vis the Catholic Church.

What is perhaps most interesting is his attempt to logically deduce that demonic intelligences alone can be responsible for the magic of the sorcerers in Summa Contra Gentiles III, Section 2.

For Thomas, the incantations of the sorcerers can't have direct effects upon nature because nature lacks the very intellectual capacity to respond to speech.

Wisdom enables us to transcend our limited perspective as finite beings and to embrace the eternal to the extent that we are able.

In his teaching on wisdom, St. Thomas Aquinas distinguishes between various types of wisdom.

For instance, earthly wisdom entails a certain prudence concerning the governance of earthly things.

And while there is nothing inherently wrong with earthly wisdom, it can lend itself to abuses if it is separated from a wisdom that comes from God.