Quotes About Aquinas

Aquinas demonstrates how the laws of nature could unlock the mysteries of why and how human beings built communities, how and why they framed laws, and how they interacted with one another in society. His analysis of the role of natural law in politics would set off a revolution that had huge consequences for the future.

For Aristotle, it was man's nature to know things. For Aquinas, to know is to be in an existential sense; to know the world is to be part of the world ourselves. God has put us into the world for a purpose, His purpose. We need to use and understand that world to catch a glimpse of that purpose, and thus a glimpse of God Himself.

All the same, Aquinas had achieved what no one had before or since: a fusion of Platonized Christianity with Aristotle's science of man. It is one of the great achievements of Western civilization. But it didn't last. Even before Aquinas's death, the old opposition would reassert itself. He would be forced to leave the University of Paris and die in his former home of Naples while the intellectual battle raged around him.

Aquinas was no Averroist. His life's work would be an implicit repudiation of Averroës's idea that reason has a higher claim to truth than faith does.12 Instead, Thomas Aquinas's reading of Aristotle led him in a different direction. He would conclude that faith and reason are actually two sides of the same coin. His writings would try to persuade his age that men are part of both a divine and a human order, and both have valid standing in their lives.

Concerning perfect blessedness which consists in a vision of God.

In fact, even Aquinas dissolved the fatal problem of natural, physical evil by tinkering with God's omnipotence. As Baron von Hugel noted, Aquinas said that the Divine Omnipotence must not be taken as the power to effect any imaginable thing, but only to effect what is within the nature of things.

Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel—three enslavers of the mind. The worst form of despotism is the system, in philosophy and in everything.

That Unmoved Mover will not be a combination of actual and potential at all—it will be pure actuality, since if it had potential, that potential could only be actualized by another force, which would continue the regress. This final Unmoved Mover, says Aquinas, is what we call God. And that Unmoved Mover must exist immaterially, exist outside of time and space, and be perfect—otherwise, the Unmoved Mover would not be pure actuality.20

Aquinas posited, then human beings can examine the natural world as a pathway to understanding Him. God made nature; to discover nature is to investigate the works of God. In fact, God wanted man to do this—God wanted man to seek Him everywhere. And God granted human beings the power of free will and reason to do so

What is contemplation? Says Aquinas: "Contemplation regards the simple act of gazing on truth.

Thomas Aquinas is but Aristotle sainted.

Aquinas teaches: " As God did not bind His power to the Sacraments, so as to be unable to bestow the sacramental effect without conferring the Sacrament; neither did He bind His power to the ministers of the Church, so as to be unable to give angels power to administer the Sacraments.

Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep, a bath and a glass of wine

John Finnis observed that, since there is no doctrine of subjective rights in Aquinas and there is such a doctrine in Suarez, a "watershed" must be situated somewhere between the thirteenth century and the seventeenth. But this view rests on the fallacy, widespread among modern jurists and philosophers who are not medieval specialists, that if an idea is not to be found in Aquinas it is not really a medieval idea at all.

They [the Jesuit boys] were full of corny quips and Eastern college talk and had nothing on their bird-beans except a lot of ill-understood Aquinas for stuffing for their pepper.

In fact, it was not until after Aquinas, in the 14th and 15th centuries, that the playing of musical instruments became a widespread, regular and accepted feature of ordinary Western worship.

Umberto Eco's first published book was the dissertation he wrote at the University of Turin, on problems of aesthetics in the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies. I think that young people who want to understand the world can profit from the works of Plato and Socrates, the behaviour of the three Thomases, Aquinas, More and Jefferson — the austere analyses of Immanuel Kant and the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. [The World Is My Home (1991)]

Reason in man is rather like God in the world.

But to say, as some writers alluded to by Augustine (Gen. ad lit. ii, 4), that waters resolved into vapor may be lifted above the starry heaven, is a mere absurdity.

In this being may our treatise find its end and fulfillment.

Reply to Objection 1: Jerome is speaking according to the teaching of the Greek Fathers; all of whom hold the creation of the angels to have taken place previously to that of the corporeal world.

Now the highest good existing in things is the good of the order of the universe, as the Philosopher clearly teaches in Metaph. xii.

The existence of a prime mover- nothing can move itself; there must be a first mover. The first mover is called God.