Thomas Aquinas was a philosopher of the 13th century of the high Middle Ages and indeed
his work represents something like a high watermark in terms of the synthesis that he
creates from ancient philosophical wisdom and the Christian tradition of which he was
a part in in some ways his work is is cathedral like itself just in its largeness and and
its subtlety and its attention to detail so what were his influences and how did he create
the synthesis that he did create? What are its characteristics? Well Aquinas was influenced
by the great Boethius by Augustine but he he pushes beyond them in a number of ways.
You know despite the fact that Boethius had translated Aristotle's logical texts his logical
works Aristotle's corpus was fairly lost to the West during the Middle Ages and so Western
Christian philosophy tended to be dominated by, formed by the kind of Neoplatonic influences
that shaped Augustine's and Boethius's thought. Aquinas himself accepts this Neoplatonized
Christianity as well by degrees but by the 13th century there had been a a reintroduction
an influx of Aristotle's Metaphysics of his Ethics of the entire Aristotelian corpus principally
by way of the Muslim philosophers who had preserved and translated and offered important
commentaries on Aristotle's work so Aquinas then becomes the beneficiary of this. He becomes
a recipient of all of Aristotle's work he digs into it and is able to create a a synthesis
of Neoplatonism of Aristotelianism and of of Christianity in in a way that hadn't really
been done before so Aquinas accepts the overall history of the world the philosophy of history
that Augustine had developed in his City of God but he does make a few tweaks to Augustine's
account of human nature so remember Augustine being influenced by the Neoplatonists thinks
of the human person as having as a soul and more than that thinks of the human person
as almost being identical to the soul. So the soul is the real locus or bearer of individuality
for for Augustine. Aquinas in his reading of Aristotle tweaks this this point of view
and says that in point of fact souls and bodies need to be understood as more integrated so
you are according to Aquinas an animal. You are an animal who's informed by a rational
principle a rational aspect or a rational soul but the rational soul is not you. You
are the thing or the animal that is informed by the rational soul so you see he he goes
from the sort of Platonic perspectives back to the Aristotelian perspective that had sort
of been lost during the stretch of time between Augustine and Aquinas. However you'' remember
that according to Aristotle since the soul is the form of the body and forms can't exist
apart from the matter that they inform or in which they inhere you can't have life after
death you know it's it's understandable why from a Christian point of view Boethius and
Augustine and the others would be attracted to the Platonic picture over against Aristotle's
picture because Plato does allow for disembodied existence life after death. So here again
Aristotle gets tweaked by Aquinas just as Aquinas had tweaked the picture that Augustine
hands down. He does it this way. According to Aquinas the rational soul that informs
the body and goes together to make the compound which is you the individual human person is
itself a subsistent entity that means that it's not a generic essence but it's actually
individual and individually subsistent in such a way that it is capable of existing
after the death of the body. In other words he alters Aristotle's picture so as to allow
for life after death as his Christianity looks to require but you've got be careful here
because you might think of Aquinas's view of life after death as being pretty odd from
a Christian perspective this is because again it isn't you that survives the death of your
body it's the rational part of you the rational part of you is no more you then for example
your body is remember you're a body soul composite so in your disembodied existence after death.
You are a kind of a partial thing. You you exist in a kind of hazy defective way. You're
in a real sense half the man that you used to be. That might sound a little bit strange
from a Christian point of view but as a matter fact I think it's to be expected. It it it
might sound odd from a contemporary and kind of popular version of Christianity but it
certainly doesn't sound odd from Aquinas's point of view that's because as you'll recall
the eschatological focus of Christianity is on the body and the spiritual as well but
not spiritual in contradistinction to or over against the body. So the focus is on the integration
of heaven and earth, body and soul it's not focused on leaving the physical world and
the spiritual to the exclusion of the body. Remember if if if death is the separation
of the soul and the body and death is itself a curse a consequence of sin it's not something
that God had in mind for rational creatures it it it's not God's endgame to see to it
that your soul is divorced from your body rather that's an unnatural state of existence
for you. And so it stands to reason that to the extent that you exist at all at outside
of a body you exist in a very subpar kind of defective mode awaiting the the perfection
of existence that entails the reintegration of body and soul so that's an important way
in which Aquinas takes over the classical philosophy together with the Christian tradition
that he'd been handed and reorients it I think towards a more sort of classically Abrahamic
or Hebraic outlook. There's another way as well that Aquinas takes up the Aristotelian
framework and and Christianizes it and it concerns what Aquinas what Aristotle has to
say about the end or the goal of human being. So remember for Aristotle the end of human
being is a happiness the end of the human being is eudaimonia to flourish and so forth
so there's a way in which the natural virtues of temperance fortitude and so forth enter
in to the good life to the happy life of the individual leading towards the flourishing
or full flowering of of human potential. Aquinas takes up this picture and endorses in broad
outline Aristotle's view of practical wisdom of the virtues and of the natural end of human
beings as being directed towards eudaimonia however Aquinas adds an additional supernatural
level or layer to his account of the end of man so what he says is that the end or the
goal of of human beings needs to be distinguished into the natural end which is described by
Aristotle and man's supernatural end. The supernatural end of man is the beatific vision.
It lies in the love and intimate communion had with and through God who is the the beginning
and the end of of all things. How do you attain this end? Well, you know along the model that
he uses with respect to the natural end of of human beings the virtues enter into the
story here but they're a different set of virtues. The natural virtues lead to or or
are related to with eudaimonia flourishing the supernatural virtues are the virtues that
lead to or are related to the beatific vision the supernatural virtues of faith of hope
and love or charity. Now these things are not natural virtues because they come to us
adventitiously by way of the operation of the Holy Spirit through the ministry of the
city of God or the church and it's the bestowal the presentation of these gifts that lead
to the kinds of dispositions, habits, and so forth that are then able to transform the
individual sort of bottom-up inside out so that they are they are made capable of sharing
union and communion love with God and the saints and the life everlasting so again what
you see in Aquinas is you see a a a gathering up of the Neoplatonic elements that had so
influenced his forebears all of the Aristotelian elements that he sees as right and as good
and as synthesizable with the overall traditional Christian worldview that he begins his philosophy
with and through which he transforms philosophy.