Search Results

In his commentary on the Gospel according to Saint John, Saint Thomas Aquinas states the principal point—the unifying theme—of the Gospel: to “show the divinity of the incarnate Word”. In view of this intention, Saint Thomas divides the Gospel into two parts: in the first, Saint John presents the divinity of Christ, and in the second he manifests that divinity through those things Christ did in the flesh. A scholastic division of the text appears to be a product of the 13th century. As a technique for interpreting texts, it is not limited to sacred scripture. It is used principally to elucidate the literal sense of scripture. The scholastic division of the text as a method employed by the doctors of the high Middle Ages is not without its theological character. Certainly for those who were masters of theology, the commenting on scripture was their primary task.

The four senses of scripture honored during the Middle Ages generated two memorable lines of verse, a distich, that would be cited by Nicholas of Lyra around the year 1330 as if well known to all his 14th-century readers. Those Latin lines may be rendered loosely as: “the letter teaches what's been done; allegory—your belief; moral—what you ought to do; anagogy—where you'll get relief”. These four senses, their possible synonyms included, dominated Christian biblical scholarship from patristic to early modern times. After three medieval witnesses to the “four senses”, one post-medieval exegete will be adduced to account for the gap between the Middle Ages and our time: Jean Astruc seems to have transformed the problematic of “senses” into one of “sources”. These three medieval exegetes are Godfrey of Saint Victor, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Nicholas of Lyra.

This chapter explores the limits of Saint Thomas's essence-existence doctrine. In the Thomistic sense of drawing back to a ground, many metaphysicians explain the bond of unity by reducing the multiplicity to modes of some one central perfection, which all beings participate in diversely, such as unity, goodness, consciousness, and matter. For Saint Thomas, the central perfection of the universe is the very act of existence itself. This is a participation doctrine, following the same general structure of participation worked out by the Neoplatonic school, with its four basic elements.

This chapter examines the relation between religious art and metaphysics as studied by Saint Thomas. It aims to uncover the underlying metaphysical and epistemological structures supporting the ability of authentic religious art to provide symbolic expression to the transcendental and the relation of humans to it. The epistemological structure is based on Saint Thomas's distinctive theory of human understanding as a synthesis of sense and intellect.

This chapter answers the question: Is the ethical eudaimonism of Saint Thomas too self-centered? This criticism of the teleological approach of Saint Thomas deserves careful reflection on the part of Thomists and some adjustment in the way his doctrine is presented. It is important to differentiate the context of two approaches provided by Saint Thomas and the von Hildebrand school.

This chapter discusses the relation between conscience and the person. Conscience refers to that “inner voice” that advises a person and commands him in the presence of a moral decision as to how to act in a given situation. There is no mature person without the voice of conscience, and no conscience save in a person.

This chapter presents traditional Catholic doctrine on the creation of the human soul by God. It provides information on the classic philosophical argumentation of Saint Thomas regarding the latter Catholic doctrine. It also discusses new contemporary challenges to it from within Christian thought.

This chapter discusses the integration of personalism and metaphysics in twentieth century Thomism. There are several steps to unveiling the personalist dimension. The first step is to discover what it means to belong to a community of real existents. The second step involves the basic qualification for any member, which is to present itself to this community by its characteristic actions. The third step, for Saint Thomas, is to acknowledge that every real being is by nature active. Lastly, the whole order of real beings must by nature be dyadic, a giving-receiving whole.

John D. Caputo reminds us that the impossible immobilizes us on the cognitive level, but then we shift to the conative, to the sphere of praxis and the pragmatic order. This is where Saint Thomas Aquinas developed his theology of grace even to the point of a theology of “merit”, wherein our grace-enabled praxis creates our eternal destiny. As Caputo might put it, we experience the impossible by doing it. For Aquinas, merit is not a psychological category of motivation — it is grace realism in the pragmatic order. Aquinas developed his theology of merit within his theology of grace, elaborated in the philosophical categories of Aristotle. He spoke of “human nature”, which is the essence of the human being as source of human activity unto a human end. As part of the modern vocabulary, the term “experience” fell under the suspicion of the Vatican, which delayed the development of any modern Catholic theology. Today, postmodern philosophy and theology question subjectivity together with the objectivity of metaphysical language as appropriate loci for talk about God.

Arias Montano’s magnum opus drew from two genres that were vehicles for discussions about the relationship between the revealed Word, the study of nature and the purpose of natural philosophy: hexameral commentaries and Mosaic philosophies. Using several examples of exegesis about the biblical passage on the celestial waters (Gen 1, 7), this chapter illustrates how controversial aspects of natural phenomena were dealt with in the hexameral commentaries of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Basil of Caesarea, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Agostino Steuco, Antonio de Honcala, and Luis de León. It shows that the scholastic style employed by most commentators was an effective way to propose some radical cosmological re-conceptualizations which were presented as valid alternatives to prevailing natural philosophical explanations. The chapter then compares this genre to early examples of Mosaic philosophies, in particular an early Spanish exemplar of the genre Francisco Valles de Covarrubias’s Sacra philosophia. Although Arias Montano’s work was ultimately very different from these two genres—he despised scholastic language, for one—he shared with their authors some very influential historical ‘truths’ that undergirded both genres: the concept of Hebrew as the Adamic language, the veracity of the Genesis account and the Mosaic authorship of Genesis.

This chapter examines developments in the musical career of Johann Sebastian Bach in Leipzig during the period from 1723 to 1730. In 1723, Bach took his family to Leipzig when he was appointed Kantor at the Saint Thomas School. This chapter clarifies that contrary to claims by English-language writers Bach was never professionally connected with the Thomaskirche, the church adjacent to the school building where Bach and his family had their lodgings.