What did Thomas Aquinas write that explains Christian beliefs in light of reason?

Answer 1

A:He wrote: Summa Theologica, Catena Aurea: A Commentary on the Four Gospels Collected Out of the Works of the Fathers etc B:Thomas Aquinas also wrote commentaries on Aristotle. The teachings of Aristotle, which had more recently become available European theologians (who were the philosophers of the age) had disturbed the previous consensus, which had been built on the ideas of Plato. The latter could be considered to represent a more "spiritual" perception of the world. Aristotle, who came after Plato, did not just expand on what Plato had taught but developed his own theories based upon observation and study of nature. It involved a strict classification of everything. From a modern perspective, this could be said to be a more scientific view of the world.

Aristotle argued that the reason for anything coming into being can be attributed to four different active causal factors:

1. Material cause - e.g. the material cause of a table is the timber used to build it.
2. Formal cause - what we call the design (its form). This is parallel to Plato's idea of a universal "form." e.g. we have tables because there is a single universal concept of a table, which proceeded all tables. However, Aristotle differed from Plato in that in his system there was no universal "form." Instead we gain the idea of a table from our observations of all the examples of tables that we know.
3. The Efficient cause - the thing that brings the thing into being, in our example, the carpenter.
4. The Final cause - the purpose for which the thing is made, e.g. I have a table in order to gather my family around at dinner.

Aristotle believed that this quite simple model was able to explain the coming into being of everything. It is a view with which modern people are immediately comfortable, even if it also somewhat distant from modern science. However, Aristotle's approach was far removed from Plato's more mystical approach, which saw "universal forms" behind everything.

One has only to read a synopsis of Thomas Aquinas' teaching that we can see that he had fully adopted Aristotle's approach of classifying everything. e.g. He defined the four cardinal virtues as prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude.

He also had Aristotle's four causes in mind when he analysed human and divine actions, although that is not so obvious to the casual reader:

• Virtue denotes a certain perfection of a power. Now a thing's perfection is considered chiefly in regard to its end. But the end of power is act. Wherefore power is said to be perfect, according as it is determinate to its act.

This kind of theoretical discussion is of little interest today outside of theological and philosophical studies. We prefer to go straight to the teachings of Jesus and the Apostles.

Nevertheless, Thomas Aquinas served a very useful purpose in regard to the question being considered here, since he was able to provide an explanation of Christian teaching using the hard search light of Aristotle's philosophy (against the "soft search light" of Plato's teachings). He provided a new framework for Christian understanding, although no modern Protestant could endorse his attitude to the treatment of those he considered to be heretics. It is also possible to argue that he was too dependent on the Aristotle for his view of the nature of God.