Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: a brief digression. The teachings of Thomas Aquinas

10.10.2019

Thomas Aquinas (otherwise Thomas Aquinas or Thomas Aquinas, lat. Thomas Aquinas Italian. Tommaso d "Aquino) - philosopher and theologian, systematizer of orthodox scholasticism, church teacher, founder of Thomism, member of the Dominican order. Born around 1225 (Bertrand Russell gives the date 25 January 1225), Roccasecca castle, near Aquino - died March 7, 1274, Fossanuova monastery, near Rome). Paris and Cologne for novitiate and theological studies; during this period Albertus Magnus was his tutor.

Since 1879, he has been recognized as the most authoritative Catholic religious philosopher, who connected the Christian doctrine (in particular, the ideas of Augustine the Blessed) with the philosophy of Aristotle. Formulated five proofs of the existence of God. Recognizing the relative independence of natural being and human reason, he argued that nature ends in grace, reason - in faith, philosophical knowledge and natural theology, based on the analogy of being, - in supernatural revelation.

The works of Thomas Aquinas include two extensive treatises covering a wide range of topics - "The Sum of Theology" and "The Sum against the Gentiles" ("The Sum of Philosophy"), discussions on theological and philosophical problems ("Debatable Questions" and "Questions on Various Subjects"), detailed commentaries on several books of the Bible, on 12 treatises of Aristotle, on the "Sentence" of Peter Lombard, on the treatises of Boethius, Pseudo-Dionysius and on the anonymous "Book of Causes", as well as a number of short essays on philosophical and religious topics and verse texts for worship , for example, the work "Ethics". "Debatable Questions" and "Comments" were largely the fruit of his teaching activities, which included, according to the tradition of that time, disputes and reading authoritative texts, accompanied by comments.

The greatest influence on the philosophy of Thomas had Aristotle, largely creatively rethought by him; also noticeable is the influence of the Neoplatonists, the Greek commentators Aristotle, Cicero, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Augustine, Boethius, Anselm of Canterbury, John of Damascus, Avicenna, Averroes, Gebirol and Maimonides and many other thinkers.

2. Ideas of Thomas Aquinas

2.1 Theology and philosophy. Steps of Truth

Aquinas distinguished between the fields of philosophy and theology: the subject of the first is the "truths of reason", and the second - the "truths of revelation". Philosophy is in the service of theology and is as inferior to it in importance as the limited human mind is inferior to divine wisdom. Theology is a sacred doctrine and science based on the knowledge possessed by God and those who are blessed. Communion to divine knowledge is achieved through revelations.

Theology can borrow something from the philosophical disciplines, but not because it feels the need for it, but only for the sake of greater intelligibility of the positions it teaches.

Aristotle distinguished four successive levels of truth: experience (empeiria), art (techne), knowledge (episteme) and wisdom (sophia).

In Thomas Aquinas, wisdom becomes independent of other levels, the highest knowledge about God. It is based on divine revelations.

Aquinas identified three hierarchically subordinate types of wisdom:

Wisdom of Grace.

Theological wisdom is the wisdom of faith using reason.

Metaphysical wisdom is the wisdom of the mind, comprehending the essence of being.

Each is endowed with its own "light of truth."

Some truths of Revelation are accessible to the understanding of the human mind: for example, that God exists, that God is one. Others - it is impossible to understand: for example, the divine trinity, resurrection in the flesh.

Based on this, Thomas Aquinas deduces the need to distinguish between supernatural theology, based on the truths of Revelation, which man is not able to understand on his own, and rational theology, based on the “natural light of reason” (knowing the truth by the power of human intellect).

Thomas Aquinas put forward the principle: the truths of science and the truths of faith cannot contradict each other; there is harmony between them. Wisdom is the striving to comprehend God, while science is the means that contributes to this.

2.2 About being

The act of being, being an act of acts and the perfection of perfections, resides within every "existing" as its innermost depth, as its true reality.

For every thing, the existence is incomparably more important than its essence. A single thing exists not due to its essence, because the essence does not imply (implies) existence in any way, but due to participation in the act of creation, that is, the will of God.

The world is a collection of substances dependent for their existence on God. Only in God are essence and existence inseparable and identical.

Thomas Aquinas distinguished between two types of existence:

1. existence is self-existent or unconditional.

2. existence is accidental or dependent.

Only God is authentic, true being. Everything else that exists in the world has an untrue existence (even the angels, who stand at the highest level in the hierarchy of all creations). The higher the “creations” are on the hierarchy levels, the more autonomy and independence they possess.

God does not create entities in order to force them to exist later, but existing subjects (foundations) that exist in accordance with their individual nature (essence).

2.3 About matter and form

The essence of everything corporeal lies in the unity of form and matter. Thomas Aquinas, like Aristotle, considered matter as a passive substratum, the basis of individuation. And it is only thanks to the form that a thing is a thing of a certain kind and kind.

All spiritual beings are complex subsystem forms. Purely spiritual - angels - have essence and existence. There is a double complexity in man - not only essence and existence, but also matter and form are distinguished in him.

Thomas Aquinas considered the principle of individuation: form is not the only cause of a thing (otherwise all individuals of the same species would be indistinguishable), so the conclusion was made that in spiritual beings forms are individualized through themselves (because each of them is a separate species); in corporeal beings, individualization occurs not through their essence, but through their own materiality, quantitatively limited in a separate individual.

In this way, the "thing" takes on a certain form, reflecting spiritual uniqueness in limited materiality.

The perfection of form was seen as the greatest likeness of God himself.

2.4 About man and his soul

The individuality of a person is the personal unity of the soul and body.

The soul is the life-giving force of the human body; it is immaterial and self-existent; it is a substance that acquires its fullness only in unity with the body, thanks to it, corporality acquires significance - becoming a person. In the unity of the soul and body, thoughts, feelings and goal-settings are born.

Thomas Aquinas believed that the power of understanding of the soul (that is, the degree of knowledge of God by it) determines the beauty of the human body.

The human soul is immortal.

The ultimate goal of human life is the achievement of bliss, acquired in the contemplation of God in the afterlife.

According to his position, man is an intermediate being between creatures (animals) and angels. Among bodily creatures, he is the highest being, he is distinguished by a rational soul and free will. By virtue of the latter, a person is responsible for his actions. And the root of his freedom is reason.

A person differs from the animal world in the presence of the ability to know and, on the basis of this, the ability to make a free conscious choice: it is the intellect and free (from any external necessity) will that are the basis for performing truly human actions (as opposed to actions characteristic of both a person and and animal) belonging to the sphere of the ethical. In the relationship between the two highest human abilities - the intellect and the will, the advantage belongs to the intellect (a situation that caused controversy between the Thomists and the Scotists), since the will necessarily follows the intellect, representing for it this or that being as good; however, when an action is performed in specific circumstances and with the help of certain means, volitional effort comes to the fore (On Evil, 6). Along with a person's own efforts, the performance of good actions also requires divine grace, which does not eliminate the originality of human nature, but improves it. Also, the divine control of the world and the foresight of all (including individual and random) events do not exclude freedom of choice: God, as the highest reason, allows independent action secondary causes, including those entailing negative moral consequences, since God is able to turn the evil created by independent agents to good.

Thomas Aquinas, who came from the nobility of the Kingdom of Naples, preferred the peaceful joys of science to the adventurous life of a feudal baron and, despite opposition from his father, entered the monastic order of the Dominicans. Abducted by his brothers while leaving Italy for Paris, Thomas was kept as a prisoner in his fathers' castle. After two years, he still managed to escape and settle in Cologne as a student of the famous scholastic philosopher Albert the Great. He became his enthusiastic student and devoted himself passionately to the study of Aristotle. Since then, all the thoughts of Thomas Aquinas have focused on acquainting the Christian West with Aristotelian philosophy on the Greek text, and especially with Physics And Metaphysics which existed until now only in a Latin translation made from Arabic. Subsequently returning to his homeland, Thomas died in 1274, barely 50 years old, after a life entirely devoted to science and reflection.

Thomas Aquinas. Artist Carlo Crivelli, 15th century

Philosophy is indebted to Thomas Aquinas for a number of treatises relating to Aristotle's Metaphysics ( Opuscula de materiae naturа, de ente et essentia, de principiis naturae, de principio individuationis, de universalibus, etc.), and his "Summa Theology" ( Summa theologiae), which gradually supplanted the "Sentences" Petra Lombard, became the basis for the teaching of dogma in the Catholic Church.

Thomas Aquinas himself did not consider his philosophy original and claimed that he was striving only for an exact reproduction of the main ideas of Aristotle. However, he clothed Aristotelian thought in a new, medieval form, whose originality raised it to the rank of independent teaching. The ideas and categories of Thomas Aquinas partly laid the foundation for the philosophical language of modern times.

According to Thomas, philosophy in the proper sense (“first philosophy”) has being as such as its object ( ens in quantumens). There are two kinds of being entia): material objects that exist objectively, really ( essay in re), and substances, ideal entities ( essentialiae, substantiae). Most of the latter, like the former, consist, as Aristotle taught, of form and matter. There is only one simple essence or pure form without the admixture of matter: God.

Both matter and form represent being ( entia). They differ from each other in that the form exists inactu(in reality), while matter is only in potency(in the possibility realized by means of the form). In general, matter is everything that maybe to be, all that exists in possibility.

Depending on whether a possible thing is a substance (the fundamental principle) or an accident (one of the many possible manifestations of the fundamental principle), the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas distinguishes between materia ex qua aliquid fit(“matter from which something arises”, substance in possibility) - and materia in qua aliquid fit("matter in which something arises", accident in possibility). Materia ex qua does not exist on its own materialin qua exists as a relatively independent being ( subjectum). Form is what gives life to things. Depending on whether a thing is a substance or an accident, we are dealing either with a substantial form or with an accidental form. Thomas Aquinas calls the combination of matter with form generation (generatio - γίνεσζαι), which in turn is substantial and accidental. All forms are combined with matter, individualized in it and form separate objects and concepts - genera, species, individuals.

According to the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, only one form of forms, that is, God, does not combine with any matter; it has neither origin nor corruption. The more imperfect the form, the more it seeks to increase the number of individuals (individual manifestations) that realize it; the more perfect the form, the fewer individuations it has. The form of forms, God, no longer forms a species that could be decomposed into separate individuals, but is a whole being, in which the differences of persons continuously merge into the unity of essence. Since God alone is pure form ( actuspurus), without matter, and, consequently, without imperfection (for matter is, in essence, an unrealized possibility, what is not yet, absence, lack of being), then God alone is the perfect and complete mind, the meaning of all things. In him is the absolute truth, for he himself is the truth.

Truth, Thomas Aquinas further develops, is the agreement between a thought and its object. In man, this agreement exists to a greater or lesser extent, but never in perfect fullness. It never reaches absolute identity in man; never in his mind does a thought merge with the object of thought. There is always a more or less significant gap between cognition and its object. In God, ideas not only accurately reproduce things, but even the ideas of God are the things themselves. From the point of view of man, things first exist, and then he thinks about them. From God's point of view, thought precedes things that exist only because that God thinks them and that they exist such as he thinks them. So, Thomas concludes, in God there is no difference between a thought and its object; in it thought and being are identical. And since this identity is the truth, God and eat truth itself. From the fact that God is truth, it follows that God exists. For it is impossible to deny the existence of truth, and even those who deny it think that they are right, and therefore thereby assert that truth exists.

The proof of the existence of God is, according to Thomas Aquinas, the first and foremost task of philosophy; but it would never be able to fulfill it, would never even be able to rise to the idea of God, without the initial Revelation to people from the Creator himself and without the Revelation from Jesus Christ. In order for the human mind to be able to direct its efforts towards its true goal, it was necessary that from the very beginning God pointed out to him this goal, so that He himself would reveal himself to mankind. Philosophy is good and legitimate only on the condition that it takes Revelation as its starting point and arrives at it as its final goal. Only then is she on the true path when she is ancilla Ecclesiae (servant of the church, servant of theology). Thomas Aquinas, however, believed that true philosophy is also ancilla Aristotelis (Aristotle's servant), since Aristotle, in his opinion, is the harbinger of Christ in science. The Church of God, according to Thomas, is the goal toward which all earthly things strive.

Nature is a hierarchy, where every category is (according to the same Aristotelian principle) the form lower grade and matter higher. The hierarchy of bodies ends with the natural life of man, which, in turn, becomes the basis and "matter" for the higher, spiritual life that develops under the shadow of the Church, nourished by her word and sacraments, as natural life feeds on the bread of the earth. The realm of nature is related to the realm of grace, man in general to the Christian, philosophy to theology, matter to the sacrament, the State to the Church, and the emperor to the pope, just as the means is related to the end, the germ to the finished being, the possibility to implementation.

The universe, consisting of the kingdoms of nature and grace, is the best of all possible worlds, for God, Thomas believes, having conceived in his infinite wisdom the best of the worlds, could not create a less perfect world without contradicting his wisdom. To think that God could conceive perfection, but realize an imperfect world, means to assume a contradiction in God: a contradiction between his knowledge and will, between the ideal and real principles of things - which is just as repugnant to philosophy as it is to faith. The divine will, therefore, is not the will of indifference, and the freedom of God, far from being a synonym for arbitrariness and unmotivated will, is identical with necessity.

Despite the apparent opposite, the same applies to the human will. Just as the mind has a principle (reason) from which it cannot escape without ceasing to be itself, and the will has a principle from which it cannot escape without ceasing to be free will: good. Will necessary strives for the good, but sensuality strives for evil and thereby paralyzes the efforts of the will. Hence sin, which has as its source not the freedom of indifference or choice, but sensuality.

The deterministic philosophy of Thomas Aquinas is reminiscent of the views of Saint Augustine. But, by extending his principle to the highest Being, whose will he subordinates to reason, Thomas thereby frees the doctrine of Augustine from everything that is offensive to reason and conscience in it. He at the same time points to the apogee of the development of Catholic metaphysics and the beginning of its decline. Before St. Thomas Aquinas, scholastic philosophy was already showing signs of exhaustion. With him and in his face, she recovers and shines with such brilliance that the most famous names pale before him. In his devotion to the Church and her interests, in his philosophical talent, which he puts at the disposal of Catholicism, in his belief in the complete agreement of dogma with the system of the Peripatetics, Thomas is after the saint Anselm of Canterbury the most perfect type of scholar of the Church. But his faith in the harmony of dogma and reason, despite all its strength, does not have that youthful freshness that is inherent in the convictions of St. Anselm. It is rather a will-created faith, a constant effort of the vigorous will against the thousand difficulties that reflection presents to it. Since the era of St. Thomas Aquinas, reason and Catholic faith, official theology and philosophy, are two different things and come to a more or less clear consciousness of their principles and their special interests. Metaphysics will long be the vassal of theology; but, in spite of this situation, she now leads a separate life, she has her own sphere of activity.

This emergence of philosophy in the true sense of the word receives its official sanction, so to speak, in the fact of the establishment of the Faculty of Philosophy in Paris, an establishment that took place (1270) four years before the death of St. Thomas Aquinas. From this time begins the decline of scholasticism. The theologians themselves, and at their head John Duns Scott contributed to this decline.

ê Thomas Aquinas (1225/26-1274)- the central figure of medieval philosophy of the late period, an outstanding philosopher and theologian, a systematizer of orthodox scholasticism.

He commented on the texts of the Bible and the works of Aristotle, of whom he was a follower. Starting from the IV century. and to this day his teaching is recognized catholic church as a leading direction philosophical outlook(in 1323 Thomas Aquinas was canonized as a saint).

The starting principle in the teachings of Thomas Aquinas is divine revelation: for a person to be saved, it is necessary to know something that escapes his mind, through divine revelation. Thomas Aquinas distinguishes between the fields of philosophy and theology: the subject of the first is "truths of reason", and the second - "truths of revelation". God is the ultimate object and source of all truth. Not all "truths of revelation" are available to rational proof. Philosophy is in the service of theology and is as inferior to it as the limited human mind is inferior to divine wisdom. Religious truth, according to Thomas Aquinas, cannot be vulnerable to philosophy, love for God is more important than knowledge of God.

Based largely on the teachings of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas considered God as the root cause and ultimate goal of existence. The essence of everything corporeal lies in the unity of form and matter. Matter is only the recipient of successive forms, "pure potentiality", because only thanks to the form a thing is a thing of a certain kind and type. The form acts as the target cause of the formation of a thing. The reason for the individual originality of things (the "principle of individuation") is the "impressed" matter of this or that individual. Based on the late Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas canonized the Christian understanding of the relationship between the ideal and the material as the relationship between the original principle of form (“the principle of order”) and the oscillating and unsteady principle of matter (“the weakest form of being”). The fusion of the first principle of form and matter gives rise to the world of individual phenomena.

Ideas about the soul and knowledge.In the interpretation of Thomas Aquinas, the individuality of a person is a personal unity of soul and body. The soul is immaterial and self-existent: it is a substance that acquires its fullness only in unity with the body. Only through corporeality can the soul form what man is. The soul always has a uniquely personal character. The bodily principle of a person organically participates in the spiritual and mental activity of the individual. He thinks, experiences, sets goals not the body and not the soul by themselves, but they are in their merged unity. Personality, according to Thomas Aquinas, is "the most noble" in all rational nature. Thomas adhered to the idea of the immortality of the soul.

Thomas Aquinas considered the real existence of the universal to be the fundamental principle of knowledge. The universal exists in three ways: “before things” (in the mind of God as ideas of future things, as eternal ideal prototypes of things), “in things”, having received concrete implementation, and “after things” - in human thinking as a result of operations of abstraction and generalization. Man has two abilities of knowledge - feeling and intellect. Cognition begins with sensory experience under the action of external objects. But not the whole being of the object is perceived, but only that in it that is likened to the subject. When entering the soul of the knower, the knowable loses its materiality and can enter it only as a “species”. The “view” of an object is its cognizable image. The thing exists simultaneously outside of us in all its being and inside us as an image. Thanks to the image, the object enters the soul, into the spiritual realm of thoughts. At first, sensual images arise, and from them the intellect abstracts "intelligible images." Truth is "the correspondence of the intellect and the thing." The concepts formed by the human intellect are true to the extent that they correspond to their concepts that preceded in the intellect of God. Denying innate knowledge, Thomas Aquinas at the same time recognized that some germs of knowledge preexist in us - concepts that are immediately known by the active intellect through images abstracted from sensory experience.

Ideas about ethics, society and the state. At the heart of the ethics and politics of Thomas Aquinas lies the proposition that "reason is the most powerful nature of man."

The philosopher believed that there are four types of laws: 1) eternal; 2) natural; 3) human; 4) divine (excellent and superior to all other laws).

In his ethical views, Thomas Aquinas relied on the principle of the free will of man, on the doctrine of being as good and of God as absolute good and of evil as deprivation of good. Thomas Aquinas believed that evil is only a less perfect good; it is allowed by God in order to realize all the steps of perfection in the Universe. The most important idea in the ethics of Thomas Aquinas is the concept that happiness is the ultimate goal of human aspirations. It lies in the most excellent human activity - in the activity of theoretical reason, in the knowledge of truth for the sake of truth itself, and, therefore, first of all, in the knowledge of absolute truth, that is, God. The basis of the virtuous behavior of people is the natural law rooted in their hearts, which requires the realization of good, the avoidance of evil. Thomas Aquinas believed that without divine grace, eternal bliss is unattainable.

The treatise of Thomas Aquinas "On the Rule of Princes" is a synthesis of Aristotelian ethical ideas and an analysis of the Christian doctrine of the divine control of the Universe, as well as the theoretical principles of the Roman Church. Following Aristotle, he proceeds from the fact that man by nature is a social being. The main goal of state power is to promote the common good, to preserve peace and justice in society, to help subjects lead a virtuous lifestyle and have the benefits necessary for this. Thomas Aquinas favored a monarchical form of government (a monarch in a kingdom, like a soul in a body). However, he believed that if the monarch turns out to be a tyrant, the people have the right to oppose the tyrant and tyranny as a principle of government.

The son of Landalf, Count of Aquinas, Saint Thomas Aquinas was born around 1225 in the Italian city of Roccasecca, in the Kingdom of Sicily. Thomas was the youngest of nine children in the family. Despite the fact that the boy's parents came from the family of Emperors Frederick I and Henry VI, the family belonged to the lower class of the nobility.

Before the birth of his son, the holy hermit predicted to the boy's mother that the child would enter the Order of Brother Preachers and become a great scholar, reaching an incredible degree of holiness.

Following the traditions of that time, at the age of 5 the boy was sent to the abbey of Monte Cassino, where he studied with the Benedictine monks.

Thomas will stay in the monastery until the age of 13, and after a change in the political climate in the country will force him to return to Naples.

Education

Thomas spends the next five years in a Benedictine monastery, completing his primary education. At this time, he diligently studied the works of Aristotle, which would later become the starting point of his own philosophical searches. It was in this monastery, which worked closely with the University of Naples, that Thomas developed an interest in monastic orders with advanced views, preaching life in spiritual service.

Around 1239 Thomas studied at the University of Naples. In 1243 he secretly enters the Dominican order, and in 1244 he takes tonsure. Upon learning of this, the family kidnaps him from the monastery, and keeps him prisoner for a whole year. However, Thomas does not give up his views and, having been freed in 1245, he returns to the Dominican shelter.

From 1245 to 1252 Thomas Aquinas continued to study with the Dominicans in Naples, Paris and Cologne. Justifying the prophecy of the holy hermit, he becomes an exemplary student, although, ironically, his modesty often leads to misconceptions about him as a narrow-minded person.

Theology and philosophy

After completing his studies, Thomas Aquinas devotes his life to wandering, philosophical works, teaching, public speeches and sermons.

The main subject of medieval thought is the dilemma of reconciling theology (faith) and philosophy (reason). Thinkers can in no way combine the knowledge received through divine revelations with the information that is obtained naturally, using the mind and feelings. According to Averroes' "double truth theory", the two kinds of knowledge are in complete contradiction to each other. The revolutionary views of Thomas Aquinas are that "both kinds of knowledge ultimately come from God" and are therefore compatible with each other. And they are not only compatible, but also complement each other: Thomas claims that revelation can guide the mind and protect it from errors, while reason can purify and free faith from mysticism. Thomas Aquinas goes further, discussing the role of faith and reason, both in comprehending and in proving the existence of God. He also defends with all his might the image of God as an omnipotent entity.

Thomas, one of a kind, speaks of the connection of proper social behavior with God. He believes that government laws are inherently a natural product of human nature and therefore an integral part of social welfare. Strictly following the laws, a person can earn the eternal salvation of the soul after death.

Works

Peru Thomas Aquinas, a very prolific writer, owns about 60 works, from short notes to huge volumes. Manuscripts of his works were distributed to libraries throughout Europe. His philosophical and theological works cover a wide range of issues, including comments on biblical texts and discussions on the natural philosophy of Aristotle.

Shortly after the death of Thomas Aquinas, his writings are gaining wide recognition and receive ardent support among representatives of the Dominican order. His "Summa Teologica" ("The Sum of Theology"), having supplanted the "Sentences in Four Books" by Peter Lombard, becomes the main textbook on theology in universities, seminaries and schools of that time. The influence of the works of Thomas Aquinas on the formation of philosophical thought is so great that the number of comments written on them today is at least 600 works.

Final years and death

In June 1272, he accepts an offer to go to Naples to teach Dominican monks in a monastery adjacent to the university. He still writes a lot, but the significance in his writings is becoming less and less.

During the celebration of St. Nicholas in 1273, Thomas Aquinas has a vision that puts him off work.

In January 1274, Thomas Aquinas went on a pilgrimage to France, to worship in honor of the Second Council of Lyon. However, along the way, he was stricken with illness, and he stopped at the Cistercian monastery of Fossanova in Italy, where he died on March 7, 1274. In 1323, Thomas Aquinas was canonized by Pope John XXII.

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Thomas Aquinas(otherwise Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Aquinas, lat. Thomas Aquinas, Italian Tommaso d "Aquino; born around 1225, Roccasecca Castle, near Aquino - died March 7, 1274, Fossanuova Monastery, near Rome) - philosopher and theologian, systematizer of orthodox scholasticism, church teacher, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Universalis, "princeps philosophorum" ( "Prince of Philosophers"), founder of Thomism, member of the Dominican order; since 1879, recognized as the most authoritative Catholic religious philosopher, who connected Christian doctrine (in particular, the ideas of Augustine the Blessed) with the philosophy of Aristotle. Formulated five proofs of the existence of God. Recognizing the relative independence of natural being and human reason, argued that nature ends in grace, reason - in faith, philosophical knowledge and natural theology, based on the analogy of beings, - in supernatural revelation.

short biography

Thomas was born on January 25, 1225 in the castle of Roccasecca near Naples and was the seventh son of Count Landolph of Aquinas. Thomas Theodora's mother came from a wealthy Neapolitan family. My father dreamed that he would eventually become the abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Montecassino, located not far from their family castle. At the age of five, Thomas was sent to a Benedictine monastery, where he stayed for 9 years. In 1239-1243 he studied at the University of Naples. There he became close with the Dominicans and decided to join the Dominican order. However, the family opposed his decision, and his brothers imprisoned Thomas for 2 years in the fortress of San Giovanni.

Having gained freedom in 1245, he took the monastic vows of the Dominican Order and went to the University of Paris. There Aquinas became a student of Albert the Great. In 1248-1250, Thomas studied at the University of Cologne, where he moved after his teacher.

In 1252 he returned to the Dominican monastery of St. James in Paris, and four years later was appointed to one of the Dominican positions assigned to teach theology at the University of Paris. Here he writes his first works - "On Essence and Existence", "On the Principles of Nature", "Commentary on the "Sentences"".

In 1259, Pope Urban IV calls him to Rome. For ten years he has been teaching theology in Italy - in Anagni and Rome, at the same time writing philosophical and theological works. He spent most of this time as adviser on theological matters and "reader" to the papal curia.

In 1269 he returned to Paris, where he led the struggle for the "cleansing" of Aristotle from Arabic interpreters and against the scholar Siger of Brabant. By 1272 is written in a sharp polemical form a treatise on the unity of the intellect against the Averroists (De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas). In the same year he was recalled to Italy for the establishment new school Dominicans in Naples.

Illness forced him to stop teaching and writing towards the end of 1273. At the beginning of 1274 he died in the monastery of Fossanova on the way to church cathedral to Lyon.

Proceedings

The writings of Thomas Aquinas include:

two extensive treatises in the genre of the sum, covering a wide range of topics - "The sum of theology" and "The sum against the pagans" ("The sum of philosophy")
discussions on theological and philosophical problems (“Discussion questions” and “Questions on various topics”)
comments on:
- several books of the bible
- 12 treatises of Aristotle
- "Sentences" by Peter Lombard
- treatises of Boethius,
- treatises of Pseudo-Dionysius
- anonymous "Book of Causes"
a series of short essays on philosophical and religious topics
several treatises on alchemy
verse texts for worship, for example, the work "Ethics"

"Debatable Questions" and "Comments" were largely the fruit of his teaching activities, which included, according to the tradition of that time, disputes and reading authoritative texts, accompanied by comments.

Historical and philosophical origins

The greatest influence on the philosophy of Thomas had Aristotle, largely creatively rethought by him; the influence of the Neoplatonists, Greek and Arabic commentators of Aristotle, Cicero, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Augustine, Boethius, Anselm of Canterbury, John of Damascus, Avicenna, Averroes, Gebirol and Maimonides and many other thinkers is also noticeable.

Ideas of Thomas Aquinas

Main article: Thomism Theology and philosophy. Steps of Truth

Theology can borrow something from the philosophical disciplines, but not because it feels the need for it, but only for the sake of greater intelligibility of the positions it teaches.

Aristotle distinguished four successive levels of truth: experience (empeiria), art (techne), knowledge (episteme) and wisdom (sophia).

In Thomas Aquinas, wisdom becomes independent of other levels, the highest knowledge about God. It is based on divine revelations.

Aquinas identified three hierarchically subordinate types of wisdom, each of which is endowed with its own "light of truth":

wisdom of grace.
theological wisdom is the wisdom of faith using reason.
metaphysical wisdom - the wisdom of the mind, comprehending the essence of being.

About being

The act of being, being an act of acts and the perfection of perfections, resides within every "existing" as its innermost depth, as its true reality.

The world is a collection of substances dependent for their existence on God. Only in God are essence and existence inseparable and identical.

Thomas Aquinas distinguished between two types of existence:

existence is self-essential or unconditional.
existence is contingent or dependent.

Only God is authentic, true being. Everything else that exists in the world has an untrue existence (even the angels, who stand at the highest level in the hierarchy of all creations). The higher the “creations” stand, on the steps of the hierarchy, the more autonomy and independence they possess.

God does not create entities in order to force them to exist later, but existing subjects (foundations) that exist in accordance with their individual nature (essence).

About matter and form

Aquinas distinguished on the one hand the substantial (through it the substance as such is affirmed in its being) and accidental (random) forms; and on the other hand - material (has its own being only in matter) and subsistent (has its own being and is active without any matter) forms. All spiritual beings are complex substantive forms. Purely spiritual - angels - have essence and existence. There is a double complexity in man: not only essence and existence, but also matter and form are distinguished in him.

In this way, the "thing" takes on a certain form, reflecting spiritual uniqueness in limited materiality.

The perfection of form was seen as the greatest likeness of God himself.

About man and his soul

The individuality of a person is the personal unity of the soul and body.

Thomas Aquinas believed that the power of understanding of the soul (that is, the degree of knowledge of God by it) determines the beauty of the human body.

The ultimate goal of human life is the achievement of bliss, acquired in the contemplation of God in the afterlife.

A person differs from the animal world in the presence of the ability to know and, on the basis of this, the ability to make a free conscious choice: it is the intellect and free (from any external necessity) will that are the basis for performing truly human actions (as opposed to actions characteristic of both a person and and animal) belonging to the sphere of the ethical. In the relationship between the two highest human abilities - the intellect and the will, the advantage belongs to the intellect (a situation that caused controversy between the Thomists and the Scotists), since the will necessarily follows the intellect, representing for it this or that being as good; however, when an action is performed in specific circumstances and with the help of certain means, volitional effort comes to the fore (On Evil, 6). Along with a person's own efforts, the performance of good actions also requires divine grace, which does not eliminate the originality of human nature, but improves it. Also, the divine control of the world and the foreseeing of all (including individual and random) events does not exclude freedom of choice: God, as the highest cause, allows independent actions of secondary causes, including those entailing negative moral consequences, since God is able to turn to good evil created by independent agents.

About knowledge

Thomas Aquinas believed that universals (that is, concepts of things) exist in three ways:

Thomas Aquinas himself adhered to a position of moderate realism, dating back to Aristotelian hylomorphism, abandoning the position of extreme realism, based on Platonism in its Augustinian version.

Following Aristotle, Aquinas distinguishes between passive and active intellect.

Thomas Aquinas denied innate ideas and concepts, and before the beginning of knowledge he considered the intellect similar to tabula rasa (lat. “blank slate”). However, people are born general schemes", which begin to act at the moment of collision with sensual material.

passive intellect - the intellect into which the sensually perceived image falls.

active intellect - abstraction from feelings, generalization; the emergence of the concept.

Cognition begins with sensory experience under the action of external objects. Objects are perceived by a person not as a whole, but in part. When entering the soul of the knower, the knowable loses its materiality and can enter it only as a “species”. The “view” of an object is its cognizable image. The thing exists simultaneously outside of us in all its being and inside us as an image.

Truth is "the correspondence of the intellect and the thing." That is, the concepts formed by the human intellect are true to the extent that they correspond to their concepts that preceded in the intellect of God.

Initial cognitive images are created at the level of external senses. Inner feelings process initial images.

Inner Feelings:

the general feeling is the main function, the purpose of which is to bring together all sensations.
passive memory is a repository of impressions and images created by a common feeling.
active memory - retrieval of stored images and views.
intellect is the highest sensible faculty.

Cognition takes its necessary source in sensibility. But the higher the spirituality, the higher the degree of knowledge.

Angelic knowledge - speculative-intuitive knowledge, not mediated by sensory experience; carried out with the help of inherent concepts.

Human cognition is the enrichment of the soul with the substantial forms of cognizable objects.

Three mental-cognitive operations:

creation of a concept and retention of attention on its content (contemplation).
judgment (positive, negative, existential) or comparison of concepts;
inference - the linking of judgments with each other.

Three types of knowledge:

the mind is the whole realm of spiritual faculties.
intellect - the ability of mental knowledge.
reason is the ability to reason.

Cognition is the noblest activity of man: the theoretical mind, comprehending the truth, comprehends the absolute truth, that is, God.

Ethics

Being the root cause of all things, God, at the same time, is the ultimate goal of their aspirations; the ultimate goal of morally good human actions is the achievement of bliss, which consists in the contemplation of God (impossible, according to Thomas, within the present life), all other goals are evaluated depending on their ordered orientation towards the final goal, the deviation from which is an evil rooted in lack existence and is not some independent entity (On Evil, 1). At the same time, Thomas paid tribute to activities aimed at achieving earthly, final forms of bliss. The beginnings of proper moral deeds with inside are virtues, on the outside - laws and grace. Thomas analyzes the virtues (skills that enable people to consistently use their abilities for good (Summary of Theology I-II, 59-67)) and the vices that oppose them (Summary of Theology I-II, 71-89), following the Aristotelian tradition, but he believes that that in order to achieve eternal happiness, in addition to virtues, there is a need for gifts, beatitudes and fruits of the Holy Spirit (Summary of Theology I-II, 68-70). The moral life of Thomas does not think outside the presence of theological virtues - faith, hope and love (Summa teologii II-II, 1-45). Following the theological, there are four “cardinal” (fundamental) virtues - prudence and justice (Summary of Theology II-II, 47-80), courage and moderation (Summary of Theology II-II, 123-170), with which the other virtues are associated.

Politics and Law

Law (Summary of Theology I-II, 90-108) is defined as "any command of reason that is proclaimed for the common good by those who care for the public" (Summary of Theology I-II, 90, 4). The eternal law (Summary of Theology I-II, 93), by which divine providence governs the world, does not make redundant other kinds of law arising from it: natural law (Summary of Theology I-II, 94), the principle of which is the basic postulate of Thomistic ethics - "it is necessary to strive for the good and do good, but evil must be avoided", is known to a sufficient extent to every person, and the human law (Summary of Theology I-II, 95), concretizing the postulates of natural law (defining, for example, a specific form of punishment for committed evil ), which is necessary because perfection in virtue depends on the exercise and restraint of unvirtuous inclinations, and whose power Thomas limits to the conscience that opposes the unjust law. Historically formed positive legislation, which is the product of human institutions, can, under certain conditions, be changed. The good of the individual, society and the universe is determined by the divine plan, and the violation of divine laws by a person is an action directed against his own good (Sum against the Gentiles III, 121).

Following Aristotle, Thomas believed that the natural public life requiring management for the common good. Thomas singled out six forms of government: depending on the ownership of power by one, a few or many, and depending on whether this form of government fulfills the proper goal - the preservation of peace and the common good, or whether it pursues private goals of rulers that contradict public good. Fair forms of government are monarchy, aristocracy and polis system, unjust ones are tyranny, oligarchy and democracy. The best form of government is a monarchy, since the movement towards the common good is most effectively carried out, guided by a single source; accordingly, the worst form of government is tyranny, since the evil done by the will of one is greater than the evil resulting from many different wills, moreover, democracy is better than tyranny in that it serves the good of many, and not one. Thomas justified the fight against tyranny, especially if the tyrant's rules clearly contradict the divine rules (for example, by forcing idolatry). The autocracy of a just monarch must take into account the interests of various groups of the population and does not exclude elements of aristocracy and polis democracy. Thomas placed church power above secular power, in view of the fact that the former is aimed at achieving divine bliss, while the latter is limited to the pursuit of only earthly good; however, the realization of this task requires the help of higher powers and grace.

5 Proofs for the Existence of God by Thomas Aquinas Proof by motion means that everything that moves was ever set in motion by something else, which in turn was set in motion by a third. Thus, a chain of "engines" is laid out, which cannot be infinite, and as a result, you need to find an "engine" that drives everything else, but is not itself driven by something else. It is God who turns out to be the root cause of all movement. Proof by producing cause - this proof is similar to the first. Only in this case is not the cause of the movement, but the cause that produces something. Since nothing can produce itself, there is something that is the root cause of everything - this is God. Proof through necessity - every thing has the possibility of both its potential and real being. If we assume that all things are in potentiality, then nothing would come into existence. There must be something that contributed to the transfer of the thing from the potential to the actual state. That something is God. Proof from the degrees of being - the fourth proof says that people talk about different degrees of perfection of an object only through comparisons with the most perfect. This means that there is the most beautiful, the noblest, the best - that is God. Evidence through target reason. In the world of reasonable and unreasonable beings, the expediency of activity is observed, which means that there is a reasonable being who sets a goal for everything that is in the world - we call this being God.

Reception of the teachings of Thomas Aquinas

Main articles: Thomism, Neo-Thomism

Cancer with the relics of Thomas Aquinas in the Toulouse Jacobite monastery

The teachings of Thomas Aquinas, despite some opposition from the traditionalists (some of the Thomist positions were condemned by the Parisian archbishop Etienne Tampier in 1277), had big influence on Catholic theology and philosophy, which was facilitated by the canonization of Thomas in 1323 and his recognition as the most authoritative Catholic theologian in the encyclical Aeterni patris Pope Leo XIII (1879).

The ideas of Thomas Aquinas were developed within the framework of the philosophical trend called "Thomism" (the most prominent representatives of which are Tommaso de Vio (Caetan) and Francisco Suarez), had some influence on the development of modern thought (especially evident in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz).

For a number of centuries, the philosophy of Thomas did not play a significant role in philosophical dialogue, developing within a narrow confessional framework, however, from the end of the 19th century, the teachings of Thomas again begin to arouse wide interest and stimulate actual philosophical research; a number of philosophical trends arise that actively use the philosophy of Thomas, known by the common name "neo-Thomism".

Editions

At present, there are numerous editions of the writings of Thomas Aquinas, in the original and translations into various languages; Complete collections of works were repeatedly published: "Piana" in 16 vols. (according to the decree of Pius V), Rome, 1570; Parma edition in 25 vols. 1852-1873, reprint. in New York, 1948-1950; Opera Omnia Vives, (in 34 volumes) Paris, 1871-82; "Leonina" (according to the decree of Leo XIII), Rome, since 1882 (since 1987 - republication of previous volumes); Marietti edition, Turin; edition of R. Bus (Thomae Aquinatis Opera omnia; ut sunt in indice thomistico, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1980), also released on CD.