It's sometimes been said in the wake of the Second Vatican Council that the thought of
Thomas Aquinas is no longer truly relevant today.
Aquinas was a great genius of synthesis in his own time, that's to say the 13th century.
But today we need to do our thinking in our own time in a way that Aquinas did in his
time.
That's to say, today we need to assemble common truths from our own era, from modern philosophy
and natural science, and create a new synthesis.
And toward that end, Aquinas may serve as a kind of example, but not really as a living
guide, at least not in terms of his own philosophy and its principles.
So initially that seems sensible and rather reasonable, but in fact it may be mistaken
and even naive.
Aquinas's approach to core truths about reality remains germane, and in a way, as relevant
and as powerful as ever.
So consider here a few ideas from Aquinas's philosophy.
First, St. Thomas's views on the compatibility of faith and reason.
We might call this the doctrine of reasonable faith.
Aquinas has a highly developed philosophy of the natural world that examines natural
kinds or the essences of things, and the nature of causation and time and change all in ways
that are deeply compatible with the natural sciences as they are practiced today.
And Aquinas shows us how this philosophical knowledge of the natural world is compatible
with, but not identical with, truths of the Catholic faith.
So that means he lays the groundwork for us to be able to consider how philosophy, natural
science, and divine revelation all teach us various truths about the world, but truths
that are compatible with one another.
Aquinas was neither, you might say, a fundamentalist who rejected natural learning, or a rationalist
skeptic who refused out of hand to consider the possibility of divine revelation.
Rather, he held that reason and faith are distinct, harmonious, and symphonic, and he
worked to discover the truth wherever it was to be found.
Another idea we could take from him that's still totally pertinent, we can think of his
vision of the human person.
St. Thomas teaches that the human being is one being that is a personal animal.
I am neither merely a soul nor merely a body, but I'm an embodied soul or a living personal
body, a spiritual animal, if you like.
For St. Thomas, the soul is called the form of the body, and the human person acts as a
composite in both its material and spiritual dimensions.
So that means when I'm doing something spiritual, I'm also always doing something corporeal.
And when I'm doing something corporeal as a human being, I'm always also doing something
rational and spiritual.
This is what he calls hylomorphism or form-matter-ism.
Hylomorphism transcends either a kind of materialist reductionism that sees us as uniquely a set
of atoms, or dualism that separates the body and soul from one another.
A last example we can take is Aquinas's insight into the incarnation and the sacraments.
St. Thomas teaches that human beings as rational animals are both spiritual and sensate, so
we need visible and sensate ways to order our life toward God.
So it's fitting, according to Aquinas, that God should manifest himself to the physical
world, and he does so principally by taking on a human nature.
God became human so that we could know who God is.
He invests the world with a sacredness through signs in the sacraments instituted by Christ,
so that in our own physical nature and our own sensate nature, we can really become relative
to God and learn who God is, and even offer up our physical nature to God.
The universe is populated by contingent things with various relational histories and patterns,
but in this complex world of the cosmos, God manifests himself and his glory in the incarnation
and in the sacraments, so that we can find God and then offer our own physical life to
God in the sacred liturgy.
So all of this suggests that Aquinas is not merely a museum piece or a good example from
the past, but he's a wise and contemporary interlocutor in our modern world, and he presents
us with perennial philosophy, perennial theology, perennial wisdom.
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