Thomas Aquinas (part 1)

in this lecture we're looking at Thomas Aquinas in the shape of his theological thinking and we want to begin by just noting the importance of Aquinas in the context of the Middle Ages it's hard to find anyone who surpasses Thomas Aquinas for both his prolific output and for the importance of what he has to say on frankly just about any doctrine or any topic that was in play in the Middle Ages again it's almost impossible to be hyperbolic Aquinas just is that important now for Protestants it is pretty well-known that Luther rejected Thomas Aquinas that he thought rather low of his theology but really this is an overplayed point it needs to be pointed out that Luther had some negative things to say about Aquinas but he had the number of things negative to say about the entirety of medievals classes ISM in whenever Luther pulled out the clause and whenever he went after medieval scholastics he often went after Aristotle and the over reliance on reason alone in terms of theological thinking a quantise really isn't the boogeyman here he's not the one who tipped the scales and ruined the medieval church even if you take a relatively negative view of this classic world and I dolt you still can't pin all the faults or all the excesses in terms of Aristotelian thinking on just one man and besides both in Lutheranism and in Calvinism as well as in the english-speaking world within two generations of the Reformation you have a return to Aristotelian and even to mystic thinking in the rise of what we call Protestant scholasticism so even within the Protestant heritage there is a return to medieval thinking a return to some of the categories some of the attempts to wrestle with the question of faith and reason and even if Protestant theology obviously is resting on a different foundation and it has a number of different perspectives on any number of doctrines still the issue is not scholasticism per se a or Aquinas himself but rather how we appropriate them into our overall theological vocabulary in terms of Western theology in terms of the development of scholasticism within the Catholic Church there is none frankly greater than Aquinas in the Middle Ages and so in this lecture we're going to begin by noting his life and his influence and then we're going to turn to his overall theological approach to things and in particular to the issue of faith and reason Thomas Aquinas was born to a rather lower noble house in the area of a kino down in the southern part in if you want to look at it as a boot down the lower Shin portion of the Italian peninsula and this is important to note Aquinas does actually come from a rather well-to-do family again he's not at the higher levels his family is not the most important family in the Italian States in general but rather they are of a relatively lower rank Aquinas his mother does come from a higher noble house but the family itself from the area of Aquino was itself relatively minor Thomas's father was the Duke there of the area of Aquino and so we had a great deal of ambition for his sons in right away we can notice one of the more interesting features about aquinas not a few students have noted that when we refer to the theology or the philosophy of thomas that we call it tome ism i can count on multiple hands the number of times a student has asked me why don't we refer to it as aquino ism or something like this why do we refer to it after his first name well the answer is again because he comes from a noble family because he is from the region of aquino that really is not his proper name Aquinas is a marker of his birth not of his name itself and so whenever we refer to tome ism we were referring to the theology of Thomas Thomas being that guy who happens to come from the area of Aquino so what we're talking about in this lecture is Thomism the theology of this man but he was from a noble house in fact one of the more interesting connection from this family from Aquino is the fact that Thomas is uncle was at the time of his birth the abbot of Monte Cassino you recall from a lecture on monasticism that Monte Cassino was the first Benedictine abbey in many ways it is the first real major push in the West to develop a cinematic monastic order that is to say a monastic house where you have a number of people living in community together rather than the aeromedical or the Hermit tradition that you often found out in the East so Monte Cassino is monastic royalty if you want a coin a phrase it is many ways the wellspring of the Western impulse here well you'll recall as we said in a last lecture under Bernard that from the 11th century on there was a great deal of rot in some of these old monastic houses so much money so much power so much influence meant that noble houses often lobbied for their sons or their extended family members to take up residence at times as Abbot sometimes just as high-ranking members of certain houses in order to curry favor in influence over a wealthy district controlled by the church well in this case you have exactly this Thomas's uncle is the abbot of Monte Cassino a vitally important monastery there in Italy and certainly a vitally important monastery for Europe as a whole Aquinas is born in 1225 and he had a number of brothers his father the count though seem to have been pushing his brothers for preferment or advancement in their careers through the military arts so they would be trained and horseback riding and fighting in these kinds of things for Thomas there was the hope that he would become like his uncle before him a powerful Abbot there at Monte Cassino from the age of five Thomas is sent off in fact to the city of Naples and then on to another university setting entirely in order to achieve high marks and high status from a very young age in terms of his Latin and his proficiency so that when he enjoyed the monastic orders he would have a leg up so from the beginning Thomas is being put forward for the real stately traditional monastic wing of the Catholic Church the Benedictine wing the Benedictine Order there was one problem though there was this new group of monks on the horizon just recently established officially meaning recognized by the Pope was a group known as the Dominicans and the Dominicans come from st. Dominic himself Dominic was a powerful figure a well-respected figure who was a bit of a heresy hunter st. Dominic the founder of the Dominicans had been really instrumental in the Alba jinseyun crusade we had mentioned this during our lectures in the Crusades this heretical movement this neo Gnostic movement there in the southern part of France Saint Dominic gets them in his crosshairs and he goes after them as a result of Dominic's theological bent and his you might say more apologetics tone to the founding of his monastic group Dominic envisioned a monastic order that would be the lead dog you might say the lead group when it came to theological reflection scholasticism and the defense of true doctrine against false teaching and that really is what becomes of the Dominicans however by Aquinas is youth and by the time he begins to decide what he wants to do with his life the Dominicans were relatively new the Dominicans had only been officially recognized by the Pope in 1216 Aquinas born 1225 these are you might say the New Kids on the Block the Dominicans are the new more feisty real committed serious minded monks that are on the rise in the 13th century and they took it as part of their self-identity the Dominicans did that they would be leading intellectuals in their communities they would take very seriously their theology and more importantly that they would take seriously the call to preach the gospel not just to edify those who were of the church but also to preach against false teaching wherever they may find it in fact this day if you see someone who is a Dominican you will see the initials after the name o P which in Latin almost literally carries over to the anglicize of this means the order of preachers Oh P Dominicans are the order of the preachers they are supremely gifted historically speaking at intellectual prowess preaching and defending the truth now there's a little bit of urban legend out there sometimes people are told that Dominicans gets its name from a really bad pun though many connie's in Latin means the hounds of God or the Lord's dogs you might say domine is a conjugation of Dominus which is we're get the word Lord connie's is the Latin word for dogs this is a pun this is a bad pun just goes to show the theologians have been making bad puns all throughout history but this is not the origin of the name Dominicans it comes from st. Dominic but their essence in many ways actually lives up to that pun over the centuries they really are the hounds of heaven they really are tenacious in a feisty sort of way over time not a nasty brutish kind of way but it is their call to preach and to be leading intellectuals in Europe well as it happens Thomas decides at the age of 19 that he's not going to go for the more posh and pleasant and easy lifestyle of the Benedictine Order they're at Monte Cassino and he marches into his father's rooms and he announces that he is going to join the Dominicans now the stay of this is this really is a slap in the face this is by and large disowning your family which in a feudal system is really serious it's always serious but particularly in a feudal system if you're part of a noble house and Aquinas says I am going to join the Dominicans which means I am NOT going to join the historic ties of our family to the Monte Cassino monastery and above and beyond that he is going to join the Dominicans who take a serious and rigorous vow of poverty as we saw in our lecture with Bernard the min de Caen orders are those who vow to live hand-to-mouth they will beg for their food they will not take endowments or monies and live in opulence cause you could imagine his father was not very happy Thomas had arranged to flee to Rome where he would meet up with the head of the Dominican Order and he would get his marching orders as to where to go from there the problem though is his father was not willing to let Thomas go and so he had his brothers Thomas's brothers kidnapped Thomas and lock him up in the family castle and they didn't just do this they also try to tempt him with the pleasures of the flesh there are stories of them trying to get Thomas drunk at one point they send depending on the account one or two prostitutes in to try to sleep with Thomas to see if they can break his spirit ban according to tradition Thomas chases them out and using a brand from the fire he Scrolls across onto the door warding off their sinful enticements to him and his young 19 year old flesh what's going on here well the noble family is thinking if we can just get him off this rigorous strangely intense monastic idea that he is going to join this relatively new intense order called the Dominicans if they can get him off that then well maybe they'll win him back to the family back to Monte Cassino etc the goal in other words is not to make him less of a Christian per se though of course there is some duplicity in the fact they're sending in prostitutes they're not trying to make him secular they're not mad that he's joining the church or the monastery what they feel affronted with is the fact that he is leaving their family and saying I'm going my own way and better to have him addicted to wine women and song than to have him run off and leave the family behind in the end as Thomas's mother in 1244 who intervenes realizing that the scandal of locking your son up for the rest of his natural life into the castle was not preferable to simply letting him go and so in the middle of the night she allows for a window into his room to be left open in a way he flees and he escapes first to Rome and then on to Paris Aquinas arrived in Paris in 1245 and he arrived there again as a Dominican with the sole purpose of taking on theological study with one of the leading lights in one of the great theologians of the Middle Ages a man by the name of Albert the Great it's just a point of historical fact anybody who gets the name the great after their name has done something to merit that and Albert really had he was a significantly important and influential scholastic theologian and he becomes a quite is's teacher and eventually the man who puts him forward for advancement in the ranks of teaching Thomas takes him degrees there at Paris under Albert he then moves the city of Cologne where he begins some level of teaching he then moves back to Paris where he is again rising up the ranks achieving his doctorate etc he then goes on a bit of a peripatetic lifestyle for a while he travels down the Naples then the realm then back to Paris and then back again to Rome in the Italian peninsula at some point all the while he's teaching and he's writing and it should be noted that Aquinas is one of the most prolific medieval theologians of the entirety of these centuries and in the end he died still relatively only a young man but by the time of his death considered to be one of the most important and influential figures already by the end of his own natural life and as the centuries were on the influence and the breadth and the depth of his teaching only carried his legacy even further and that legacy continues all the way until the modern world where there are still people to this day plumbing the depths of what Thomas had to say on all sorts of subjects well what was his philosophy what was his theology in our next lecture we're going to look more in-depth Lee at his theology but with the remaining time for this lecture we want to look at the subject of faith and reason as we've seen with Abelard and Anselm and really a number of others all the way back to the 11th century the primary question is faith and reason how do these things hold together and it really is Aquinas who synthesizes and brings the two subjects of faith and reason together and perhaps the most complete and balanced way of anybody in the Middle Ages now as we'll see in later lectures there are those who challenge Aquinas on his use of Aristotle akhom in particular is relatively scathing he pitches himself as the man on the sidelines saying that the emperor has no clothes but we'll get to that when we get to those lectures for now you need to know that Aquinas is considered one of the best synthesizers of the relationship of faith to reason well what is his understanding of these ideas well first and foremost he begins with Aristotle's definition of knowledge for Aristotle knowledge is basically resigned and limited to sensory perceptions we know things because we experience them now this doesn't mean that either Aquinas or Aristotle are pure materialists it just means they're not platonic they don't believe that there is a wellspring of a priori complex deductive almost mystical knowledge that we have in our mind that we receive say from the world of the forms rather the things we know we know because of sensory spirits we know them because we come across them in the context of our life and from this Aquinas splits up two categories of knowledge that are vital to understand his frankly general approach to theology itself one of the things we'll see in Aquinas is theology in our next lecture is that he is always careful to balance what is natural in common and just a fact of life you might say things that we know things that are true things that are good that are just simply a part of God's creation however on the other hand we know that because the nature of faith and what God has wrought in our hearts there is some new wellspring of information some new wellspring of insight in knowledge that we did not have before before we might believe in a God now we know through the Scriptures through meditation that Christ is Lord and that opens the door obviously to the doctrines of the Trinity etc well as we've seen all the way down to this lecture there really were two fundamental traditions that were arising there were those who were relatively pessimistic about the nature of reason to really come to much of a conclusion on God at all they were either obscurantist or they were pessimists when it came to our ability to grasp God apart from faith this is more in the Augustinian tradition this is the teachings that we see in Bernard and these are the folks who say look our will is broken it doesn't matter how much information comes into our noggin we're going to twist and pervert that truth and our eyes are blind until our wills are corrected till we have ears to hear and eyes to see through the coming of the gospel in the grace of our Lord into our hearts the problem with this side though is not just that it was obscuring dissed but also within this Augustinian tradition there is a tendency to believe that once you get your will right once you have come to faith well knowledge and all these kinds of things are just only natural more effortless you might say fix the we'll fix the direction of our hearts and knowledge of who God is in and of himself is more or less obvious doctrines just leap off the page of Scripture let's say there's no hard and deep reflection needed to really ponder these truths any more in-depth ly than we see they are on the page on the other side there were those who were all together optimistic and in some cases far too optimistic when it came to the role of natural reason in understanding these truths we saw this in particular with a person of Abelard for these folks it was more you might say a lack of content or a lack of substance in the way our minds and our rational faculties are going to approach the doctrines they saw it is altogether natural not tainted by sin but tainted by a lack of information man the problem here though is given for Abelard that information is achieved through the contents of our own dialectical reasoning we think deeply we explore these topics and we carve out things that we no longer believe based on reason and we keep the rest where Aquinas lands is really in something of a slogan that can be seen as emblematic of everything that Aquinas has to say on a lot of these complex either/or questions the fundamental root of a lot of what Aquinas has to say about theology or the Bible or on the subject of faith and reason is the slogan that grace perfects nature for those of you who are first coming to Aquinas if you get this slogan and if you understand what it means you've come a long way to really grasp in what Aquinas is attempting to do in terms of his methodology and in terms of his theology itself grace perfecting nature not obliterating nature and not simply improving through some new energy you might say the greatness of nature itself grace perfecting nature in other words where Aquinas is going to come from is he's going to look at the problem of sin but he's also going to affirm that in our natural Kappa cities as the image of God as God's creation that our goodness and our natural qualities were not obliterated because of sin rather they were tainted because of sin when that really is the fundamental problem everyone who reads the Scriptures realizes that there is something in all of us all of humanity Christian or not that has a capacity for natural thinking reasoning you not to be a Christian to be a scientist for example not to be a Christian to be a philosopher you'd not be a Christian to have wisdom in a fundamental sense Aquinas says nature has a lot to offer it is God's creation we are His image we're not troglobites heavy mouth-breathers who know nothing until faith comes into us and suddenly we are smart people Christians don't believe that everyone is dumb except for them however for Aquinas nature on its own is imperfect it is tainted it can't be left to its own devices to discover who God is fundamentally in and of himself and that for Aquinas is the role of grace grace comes into the natural thing and you might say infuses it I don't think salvation here think in terms of grace animating and giving new life in the full purpose of what nature was intended to be so let's take our minds let's take faith and reason and again we're going to look at this same grace perfecting nature move in our next lecture when we look at more substantive issues in Aquinas is the ology but when we look at faith and reason Aquinas does the same move he says our reason is smart we do have minds we can think we can find some arguments that are compelling to argue that God exists left on their own there are also laws of nature and truths and all kinds of things Aquinas says that we can discover simply by the context of our own natures now again don't read enlightenment rationalism when he's saying this we are God's image we are created to think we are created to explore to be artists to be thinkers to be all kinds of these wonderful things however Aquinas is very clear the limits of reason the limits of our natures holds us back to only being able to explore the preambles of the faith the context the the world around us creation itself you might say the preambles Aquinas says though that we need grace itself we need the faith found in scriptures in a lumen in our heart by the Holy Spirit to come along and give us what he calls the mysteries of the faith so in the preambles we can know that someone created this world we can have rational arguments that there was some creative force behind this some God that there is such a thing as goodness that justice and the common good are things we ought to know and explore but Aquinas will say it takes the eyes of faith the lumen in our hearts by the Holy Spirit to be able to even understand the depths of the mysteries of God in the person of Jesus Christ in the Trinity the Incarnation and in the atonement etc in other words for Aquinas it's not just that we need more of our intellect but it's also not just that we need our wills to be corrected so that our intellects can get on with deeper theological thinking for him it's both that we need the new direction of faith we need to have a new allegiance to Christ but also that our faith does give us more content than it had before it's not just that we get right with God and then our rational minds take over and do the rest which is probably an overdrawn caricature of where Abelard went but it actually does fit in some ways he says we have the eyes of faith now let's let the mind take over now Aquinas is no grace actually gives us new content as well as a new direction and therefore the depth of the mystery of our theological focus will always always always be grace that is perfecting nature the grace of our faith that doesn't leave our intellect or our will to their own devices but rather comes in and breathes new life and everything about who we are

Channel: Ryan Reeves

Views: 257,482

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Keywords: Thomas Aquinas (Religious Leader), Thomism, Medieval Philosophy (Literature Subject), Middle Ages (Event), Scholasticism, Faith and Reason, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (College/University), Ryan M. Reeves, Dominican Order (Religious Order), St Dominic, Albert the Great, Philosophy (Field Of Study), Theology (Field Of Study)

Id: xri0AMiAKIo

Length: 26min 22sec (1582 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2015