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CONTENDING IDEAS in WESTERN EUROPE (3 of 6)

Saint Thomas Aquinas believed that he had a better proof of God than did Anselm. Here Thomas is girdled by angels with a mystical belt of purity after his proof of chastity.

A Dominican scholar, Thomas Aquinas, lectured on Lombard's work, the Four Books of Sentences, and his commentaries on Lombard's work are said to be some of his most important early writing.

In his work entitled On Being and Essence, Aquinas begins by acknowledging the Islamic scholar Avicenna's work on this subject. And Aquinas writes: "Nothing can be called a being [emphasis added] unless its posits something in reality." To some this is typical metaphysical wordiness that conveys no useful meaning. Things exist. Stuff happens. So what? Aquinas writes that "essence signifies something common to all natures through which the various beings are placed in the various genera and species, as humanity is the essence of man, and so on..." To positivist philosophers in modern times, "humanity is the essence of man" would be more wordiness with little meaning. Biologists would be able to extend their understanding of humans without use of this formulation. The same for physicists trying to understand and categorize phenomena. But, to employ more redundancy, science is science and metaphysics is metaphysics.

Avicenna had been influenced by Aristotle. Thomas Aquinas followed suit and intended to put Aristotle into a grand and coherent Christian theology. Aquinas joined Anselm in wanting to go beyond faith by proving God's existence. He believed that he had a better proof than had Anselm. Aquinas believed that one could start with a truth and build from it logically to truths beyond sense experience, to God at the top of a hierarchical order, to the being beyond which there was no greater being.

One of the arguments put forth by Aquinas is called the First Cause argument: every effect has a cause, the universe is an effect, therefore the universe has a cause, and that cause is God. For Aquinas, God alone didn't have a beginning. Therefore, for Aquinas, the question what caused God was not relevant. And Aquinas' idea of cause was not complicated as it would be in the 20th century with the arrival of quantum physics.

Aquinas transposed Aristotle's view of happiness as the purpose of life -- a view coupled with well being, moderation, virtue and fulfillment (rather than fun). For Aquinas all of these good things were realized by knowing God and could be acquired by practice and also, most importantly for the Church, infused into believers by the grace of God mediated by Church sacraments.

Aquinas believed that not all people had the intellectual capacity to reason as well as he or those who understood him. Those people, he reasoned, did best for themselves by clinging to the authority of those more capable than they. The wisest of men, Aquinas believed, had faith in the authority of God as revealed in scripture.

Aquinas addressed the question of just wars. He found a rationale for getting around Scripture that expressed the pacifism of early Christianity, beginning with an argument by Augustine -- as if Augustine's words had authority equal to biblical authority. He described three things necessary for a war to be just: it had to be commanded by a sovereign; those attacked had to "deserve it on account of some fault;" and those doing the attacking had to have "rightful intention." This was shallow philosophy. The wars called crusades could be classified as just under these restrictions. It was easy to find fault with anyone that you wanted to consider an enemy, and it was easy to invent a good reason to attack such a faulted enemy. Rationalization was at the heart of Aquinas' intent in addressing the question. And rationalization was performing a role in the real world of privilege and war. As a philosopher Aquinas could have done better by addressing the issue of rationalization, but rationalization was a psychological issue. It would be centuries before Arthur Schopenhauer, with awkwardness, would question the reason about which Aquinas and other philosophers spoke.

Aquinas' work was applauded by some scholars but it was not welcomed at first by the Church. In 1277 the archbishop of Paris declared Aquinas' views as heresy, and this was repeated in England by the Archbishop of Canterbury.  But Church doctrine regarding philosophical complexities changed. The Church began to accept Aquinas' work and to accept Aristotle. In 1323, Pope John XXII canonized Aquinas. In 1567, Pope Pius V declared Aquinas a doctor of the Church, and the works of Aquinas would be required reading for anyone studying philosophy.