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Welcome to another of the 'Why Study' series of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies.
With me today is Dr Simon Oliver and he is going to try and answer the question; why study Thomas Aquinas?
But Simon, before we ask why study Thomas Aquinas, can you tell us something about who Aquinas is...
and something about him? Well, Thomas Aquinas lived a very long time
ago in the 13th century, and he was born around the year 1224/1225, in Northern Italy to a
very wealthy aristocratic family. They were involved in the military at the time. And
he was a very precocious young boy, he was sent to a Benedictine Monastery, Monte Cassino,
at a very young age to study there with the monks. And his family hoped that in the end
he would become a Benedictine Monk and that he would rise to be Abbot of Monte Cassino.
And in the end that didn't happen because Thomas left that monastery and he became very
interested in a new form of religious life and a new community called the Dominicans,
who were the followers of St Dominic. And what was interesting about the Dominicans
is that they were friars, they weren't monks. So monks take a vow to a particular monastery
and they stay there for the rest of their lives, and monasteries own land, they own property.
But friars, the Dominicans and another order, the Franciscans, were what are called
Mendicant Orders, so that means that they didn't own any property, that people were
not vowed to a particular place: a monastery, but they were vowed to the whole community,
to the order, and that they could move around from place to place studying and teaching;
and playing a part in church politics. And that was the life that Thomas was very attracted
to, an intellectual life of teaching. And against his family's wishes he joined this
new order, the Dominicans, which became known as the Order of Preachers, so these were teachers.
And Thomas was taught by Albert the Great, another great Dominican teacher. And he worked
for much of his life in the University of Paris, which was one of the new medieval schools,
the other two being at Oxford and Boulogne. He helped found other centres of learning
as well in Cologne. And he made an absolutely massive contribution to the Christian tradition
and Christian learning. Okay, so he lived a long time ago, he lived
in a world very different to ours. He lived in that period, that for many people is terrifying,
called the Middle Ages - so he's a medieval man. Why study him as part of a Theology degree
today? Okay, we're going back a very long time - surely
Thomas Aquinas 13th century is no longer relevant? Well he is supremely relevant. And here's
why: Thomas, his particular intellectual achievement is to draw together so many strands of classical
and medieval learning. So he receives a tradition of philosophy from Plato, known as Neo-Platonism,
that had so influenced Christian thought, and also at the time the works of Plato's
student, Aristotle, are being reintroduced into the Latin speaking west of Europe. So
a lot of Aristotle's works had really been lost, they were unknown, until they were translated
first out of Arabic, because they had been known to Islamic Scholars, and later out of
Ancient Greek into Latin so that thinkers, theologians and philosophers, like Thomas
Aquinas, could learn from Aristotle. They could learn from Platonism and Neo-Platonism,
and draw all this together to help them explicate - understand the meaning and implications
of Christian teaching. So all of a sudden you get very long works that use philosophy
to unpick precisely what is meant and what is received within Christian doctrine, within
Christian teaching. And it's Thomas' supreme achievement to draw all those things together
and to create an enormous body of written work. He only lived for 50 years, he died
around the year 1275, but he wrote two very long summaries of theology that they're called.
One of them, The Summa Theologiae, that some of our viewers may know, is written for beginners
in theology, but in its Latin and English form runs to sixty volumes so this is a very,
very lengthy work. And there is just one bit of that work that some people have heard of,
and that is the five ways of proving God's existence, which are very classical proofs
of God's existence that Thomas places near the beginning of his summary of theology,
but they account for about six or seven pages of a sixty volume work, so they're just a
tiny proportion of a massive body. And that body of work is perhaps the most influential,
the most enduring of any within Christian theology. And we learn a huge amount from
Aquinas. Particularly we learn, for example, about systems of law and about justice. So
another aspect of Aquinas' work, that is very well known, is his understanding of human
law, natural law and eternal law, and still today courses in the philosophy of law still
include as a very big part, as a very big portion, the teachings of Thomas on those
issues. But for theologians I think what is particularly important about Aquinas' work
is that he gives us ways of thinking about God, and about creation's relation to God,
that are very nuanced and very sophisticated and maintain a sense of divine mystery of
the 'otherness' of God. And they help us to resist this sense that when we use the word
God we really have a handle on what we're talking about, and we really understand God
in himself. Because Aquinas is very clear that we do not know God in himself, we know
God from his effects, from his creation. And so there's always in Aquinas, what we take
from his work, is this reticence about using the word God and about what that word means.
The great Spanish mystic, John of the Cross, was a disciple of Aquinas and he comes up
with the famous phrase 'God is nothing'. In many ways to say God is nothing, nihil, sounds
absolutely bizarre in a theological work, but can you help us with that idea that God
is no-thing? Okay well one of Aquinas' key teachings is
that God is not 'something' -let's start there okay. So when Aquinas says God is not 'some-thing'
what he means is that God is not an object, God is not another thing in the universe.
And he's really taking that teaching from a very ancient Platonic philosophy and Plato
has an image that can shed some light on this. Plato talks about the image of the sun and
the sun illuminates everything around us, it makes things knowable, it makes things
visible. And Aquinas says that in a sense God is a bit like that, God is like a source
of light that makes things known, that makes things exist. So he's not just another thing
that we see, but he's that which makes all things visible, and in that sense God is not
just 'some-thing'. So John of the Cross drives that very, very hard and says; well God is
not some-thing so maybe in a sense we might almost be right in saying God is nothing,
he is no-thing, no one thing, he is the source of all things. And Aquinas uses a theological
method, that's very prevalent in the Middle Ages, called the 'Negative Way', in Latin
the 'Via Negativa', and the Negative Way is about a claim that we should not try and say
what God is, but what God is not. To say what God is, is too difficult, so we need to start
by saying that God is not a thing, he's not a creature, he's not just another item in
our visual field, as it were. And by being so careful about our language of God, by saying
what God is not, we keep at bay any sense that we've got a handle on what this word
means. Now Aquinas in the end does think that we make positive statements about God, God
is good, and we mean what we say, and we use language like that in church and as theologians
all the time. But we need to be very careful about using language like that, because when
we say 'God is good' that doesn't mean that we know exactly the full meaning and implications
of statements like that. So there's always this reticence.
You mentioned that he was one of the most productive theologians and yet he did it all
in twenty five years, which for someone just over fifty, like myself, is really scary.
If you have to start reading Aquinas where do you start?
A very good question because the output is so prodigious. He wrote a very lengthy summary
of theology, The Summa Theologiae, multi volumed... ...which is on the web...
...which is on the web... ...in Latin and in English...
In Latin and in English and anyone can access that. He also wrote a smaller version called
The Summa contra Gentiles, which is best translated as 'The Summary of Theology Against Non Believers',
and that is only five volumes. And some have thought, some scholars have thought, that
that was deliberately short so that it could be put in your backpack, and used when you
are on missionary journeys, whether that's the case or not we don't know but never the
less it's more concise - it's more pithy. So I would start with the first volume of The
Summa contra Gentiles, 'The Summary Against Non Believers', and that is also freely available
in English translation, as are a lot of Thomas' works.
Simon, thank you very much.
Simon has tried to introduce one of the most prolific and
prodigious thinkers in the Christian tradition. I hope that it has given you an insight into
Aquinas and a little key to beginning to do some work on him yourself.
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