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Aquinas on God’s Relation to the World And Evil – Fr. Robin Ryan CP
"The Temptation in the Wilderness" by John St John Long (1824) In a famous and much-discussed article of the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas argues that when we speak of God as related to the world (as the...
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Thomas on The Incarnation and God’s Relation to Human Suffering – Fr. Robin Ryan
Original Sin The metaphysical discussion of evil needs to be supplemented by what Aquinas says about original sin. Previously we noted that Augustine developed his teaching about original sin, in...
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Thomists Wrestle With Common Sense —Étienne Gilson
Better known by its absence than by a definition. Étienne Gilson (1884-1978) was a renowned French philosopher and historian of philosophy, and a member of the prestigious French Academy. He was a...
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The Ineffable Mystery of God – Fr. Robert Barron
The cloister yard of Santa Sabina where it is reputed St. Thomas walked and pondered. After many years of exile from the courts of Egypt where he had been raised, a Hebrew man named Moses, while...
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The Fundamental Truth 1 – Etiénne Gilson
Thomas is held in the Catholic Church to be the model teacher for those studying for the priesthood. The works for which he is best-known are the Summa theologiae and the Summa Contra Gentiles. One of...
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The Fundamental Truth 2 – Etiénne Gilson
“Not merely to learn philosophy, but to become a philosopher, this is what is now at stake. It does not involve giving up philosophy as a science; it rather involves aiming at possessing philosophy in...
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The Fundamental Truth 3 – Etiénne Gilson
“Through this intellect, every man is a person and through the same intellect he can see exactly the same truth as any other man can see, provided they both use their intellects in the proper way....
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More Reading Selections from W. Norris Clarke’s Person, Being, and St. Thomas
Mandala is the Sanskrit word for circle, and the great psychologist Carl Jung called it an “archetype of wholeness.” Archetypes are those basic patterns and symbols that repeat across cultures and...
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Dante, Boethius and St. Thomas – A. N. Wilson
Boethius and Philosophy by Mattia Preti, 17th century Dante tells us after the death of Beatrice that he gave himself up to the reading of philosophy and two of the works which he studied were...
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Dante and St. Thomas – A.N. Wilson
For Dante, an objective reality existed. “There is no subjectivism or idealism in his world,” Christopher Dawson claimed; “everything has its profound ontological basis in an objective spiritual...
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Aquinas and Natural Law Theory 1 – Edward Feser
Benozzo Gozzoli (c. 1421 – 1497) was an Italian Renaissance painter from Florence. He is best known for a series of murals in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi depicting festive, vibrant processions with...
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Aquinas and Natural Law Theory 2 – Edward Feser
As the neo-Scholastic natural law theorist Michael Cronin has summed up the Thomistic view, “In the fullest sense of the word, then, moral duty is natural. For not only are certain objects natural...
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Simplicity — Brian Davies
Aquinas denies that God and his nature can be thought of as distinct. It is very important to bear all of this in mind if one’s aim is to understand Aquinas on simplicity, for what his teaching amounts...
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Objections To Simplicity 1 – Brian Davies
Aquinas thinks that there are positive reasons for not taking God to be an individual exhibiting a variety of attributes, and he wishes to give weight to all the reasons in question here. So he...
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Objections To Simplicity 2 – Brian Davies
Many of the dissenters here deny that God is simple in the sense that Aquinas thinks that he is. Why so? Could it he that they are mesmerized by the formula “God is a person”? I suspect that many of...
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Communion With God Mediated By Communion With Christ
The National Library of France. Gratio Ut Motio is not a phrase that we come upon everyday, but it is a particular grace that God has given every one of us so that we can believe in him and grow closer...
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G.K. Chesterton and ‘The Dumb Ox’ 1 – Ian Ker
Thus it was `the paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most’. The `popular poetry of St Francis and the almost rationalistic prose of St Thomas’ both...
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G.K. Chesterton and ‘The Dumb Ox’ 2 – Ian Ker
All that Lutheranism was unreal’ — yet “Luther was not unreal: He was one of those great barbarians, to whom it is indeed given to change the world.” “On a great map like the mind of Aquinas, the mind...
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The Oblivion of Being 1– Fr. Ernesto A. Lapitan Jr., O.P
Justus van Gent (or Joos van Wassenhove), Justus or Jodocus of Ghent, or Giusto da Guanto (c. 1410 – c. 1480) was an Early Netherlandish painter who later worked in Italy. His painting of Thomas...
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On the Distinction between Essence and Existence — Doug McManaman
The above diagram is merely a visual representation of a being whose essence is distinct from its existence, such as a human, or a dog, a carbon atom, etc. Now, recall that the definition of a thing...
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