The Next Few Weeks

I’ll be in Florida all of next week, so I will probably not be posting anything.
However, I do have plans of things to discuss in the weeks following.  As you can probably tell by the amount of information on Aquinas on this blog, I really like his stuff.  Also, I think Aquinas’s philosophical theology is [...]

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For Those Interested In Aquinas’s Doctrine of God

This looks to be a promising read and a great resource for understanding Aquinas’s philosophical theology from - Oxford University Press (June, 2008 ). Here’s a brief description from the publisher:
This book offers an in-depth examination of what divine simplicity means for Aquinas and how he argues for its claims. Simplicity and other divine predicates [...]

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My Soul Is Not Me

Peter Leithart and others have noted the post-modern phenomenon of what I shall call the impenetrable ego. In his book on baptism Leithart notes that the idea that the ritual actually affects the person (socially, psychologically, ontologically) seems eerie because we have this idea that “who I am is deep down inside and cannot be touched by [...]

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Who Needs the Forms?

The whole realist/nominalist argument among the Medieval philosophers often seems arcane and pedantic to us post-moderns.  I mean, who cares if the form is in the thing or somewhere else?  The whole idea of a form in things is way too “spooky.” Reality is given to us; we don’t need forms right?  Well, without answering [...]

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Aquinas’s Contra Gentiles Also Contra Autonomy

Rudi Te Velde says that Aquinas did not write the Summa contra Gentiles as a missionary manual for Dominicans to evangelize the Muslims.  This timeless work was written to refute certain errors that had come to light in the Medieval context. These errors go beyond that of the Muslim faith.
The list of errors is not restricted to contemporary [...]

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Good Article on Aquinas’s Theory of Knowledge

In a previous post I quoted Fergus Kerr who noted that Aquinas’s epistemology presupposed theology. Because the Christian God created the world and creatures in order for them both to interact on an essential level the world can be known by man.  Norman Kretzmann’s article “Infallibility, Error, and Ignorance” (in the 1992 Supplementary Volume 17 [...]

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Theological “Experts”

Thomas O’Meara notes:
The theologian and historian Yves Congar once told young Dominicans that it would take them fifteen years to grasp Aquinas. (Thomas Aquinas: Theologian, xvi)
Hmmm.

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St. Thomas in Protestant Thought

The Protestant Reformation was, among other things, a reaction to the late Medieval church and a return to the Church Fathers.  The sixteenth-century Reformers were highly critical of the doctrine of faith espoused by their Catholic contemporaries, the Schoolmen (the Catholic theologians at the various universities). By and large, later generations of Protestants seem simply [...]

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God’s Will Does Not Exclude Secondary Causes

The will of God, as it is the first and universal cause, does not exclude intermediate causes that have power to produce certain effects. Since however all intermediate causes are inferior in power to the first cause, there are many things in the divine power, knowledge and will that are not included in the order [...]

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Congar on Essentialism in Aquinas

Any attempt to present him [Thomas] as an ‘essentialist, that is, as being conscious of and as affirming first of all the common divine essence, and only secondarily the Persons in that essence, would be to betray the balance of his theology.  Such an interpretation should no longer be possible since the appearance of the [...]

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